Home on Loan

Art viewers don't have many more chances to enjoy the hospitality at Tom Deatherage's quirky the Late Show. Located in Deatherage's Hyde Park home, the gallery forgoes all the inherent pretentiousness of a furnitureless, white-walled, track-lit space. Instead, Deatherage offers drinks to his visitors and invites them into his kitchen to look at work hung above his stove and countertops. But Deatherage plans to sell the house after he opens a gallery closer to the Crossroads District. "Kansas City art audiences are lazy," he says. "It's too hard to get people to come over here. They can go to one area for twelve galleries, but they won't go out of their way for one good show."

The last exhibit Deatherage has scheduled for 4222 Charlotte Street is Grandma Gets Her Reindeer, featuring Jennifer Boe, Joe Gregory and Angela Burson and slated to run December 6 through December 31. In the meantime, Something Old, New, Borrowed and Blue spotlights an eclectic collection of work by local and regional artists. Felicia Leach contributes brightly colored, silk-screened canvas squares; Doug Russell displays studies of pseudoweathered surfaces; Jane Pronko's nearly photo-realistic New York streetscapes are on loan from the Dennis Morgan Gallery; and Larry McAnany's oil abstractions come fresh from his new studio. Deatherage ties the show together with its title -- Leach is new to the Late Show (this is her first exhibition in Kansas City), McAnany is an old favorite at the gallery, Pronko's work was borrowed and Russell's palette incorporates a lot of blue.

Silly concept aside, this unusual grouping puts representational work next to pure abstraction, reminding viewers that painting of any kind can be pared down to the same visual vocabulary of color, composition and value.

Brightening one corner of Deatherage's living room are ten of Leach's 12-inch-square screen prints. An artist in residence at the Moberly Area Community College (35 miles north of Columbia), Leach earned her bachelor's degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is working on her master's from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Each of her panels depicts a single object -- a hand grenade, a rooster, a fortune cookie, a male's nude midsection, a pair of mannequin hands -- or a combination of those objects, all against flat-color backgrounds or sparkle-print patterns.

Leach lets viewers draw their own conclusions about the relationships among the objects, and this gives her work a playful yet gimmicky feel. The violent connotation of the grenades and the sexual implications of the cocks (both fowl and human) suggest a commentary on violence and power in sexuality, but Leach's candy-colored palette and thick, cartoonish lines make it difficult to take any message too seriously. (With their eye-catching color and mass-produced screen-print aesthetic, the grenade prints look more like packaging for a toy than representations of weapons.) Leach intended the small works to be displayed interchangeably, allowing for further interpretation. "When you see a hand grenade, people might think of war, something you see a lot of on the news these days," she says. "I wanted to take viewers away from that and have them look at the objects in a different respect."

McAnany gives viewers similar responsibilities when it comes to looking at his abstract work. He says he admires and draws inspiration from landscape paintings, though his canvases contain no distinguishable trees or grassy hills. Instead, flat or curvy lines and subtle colors serve as simple reminders of those traditional landscape elements. McAnany covers his surfaces with drips, splotches, icinglike layers of oil paint, loopy pencil drawings and quick, gestural marks. "One of the things about abstract painting that I am so attracted to is that what the viewer brings to it is much more important sometimes than what the artist intends," McAnany explains.

His huge painting on the east wall covers a window -- light spills in through the glass and seeps through the canvas, giving the orange splashes of paint an iridescent glow against the mint-green and blue-gray background. McAnany recently moved his studio into an old Lutheran church full of stained-glass windows. "Not seeing the outside world except looking through stained glass made me start to think a lot more internally, to start stripping everything away except for the process," he says. That process is evident in one untitled work featuring large, Franz Kline-like strokes of brown paint on top of a camouflage-green background -- it's easy to imagine the sweeping motion necessary to create those lines.

But McAnany is inspired by something more primal, too: He was attracted to oil painting because of its sensuality. "My mother was a painter, and I remember opening up her portable painting kit. I smelled the linseed oil and the turpentine, and that was the catch for me," he says. "Maybe if I wouldn't have opened up her paint box and smelled it, I would be working in a bank right now." Although the show bills his work as "old," McAnany's four canvases, two small and two large, are the freshest work in the gallery. The potently scented paint was still wet when he brought over the work for display -- on one of the pieces, a tiny gnat is stuck in a glistening glob.