Michael Dailey: Early Dawn to Late Twilight
August 28– November 9, 2015

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Opening Reception: August 28, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Art as a Voice: October 13, 7:00 p.m. at the Community Theater
Sponsor: The Lester M. and Bernice Smith Foundation

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The San Juan Islands Museum of Art is excited to announce an exhibition of paintings by Northwest American artist Michael Dailey (1938–2009). “Early Dawn to Late Twilight” presents 15 paintings demonstrating the progression of Dailey’s art over 44 years between 1965 and 2009. Central to the exhibition are several large-scale color fields that meditate on the shifting light of the sky.

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Writing about his process, Dailey commented, “What most fascinates me about the local environment is its transitional, ever-changing, fluid nature . . . I seldom plan or construct a painting but try to get it to evolve and develop from the process of painting itself—improvising and revising until it feels right.” This exhibition presents a rare glimpse into the ever-changing and fluid nature of one of the Northwest’s great mystical painters. This is an exhibition that will alter the way one looks at the sky.

These luminous works, ethereal and vaporous, tie Dailey’s vision to artists of the Hudson River School such as John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872), to abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko (1903–1970), and to other contemporary west coast painters such as Richard Diebenkorn (American 1922–1993).

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Michael Dailey was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1938. He received BA and MFA degrees from the University of Iowa, and soon after moved to Seattle, Washington where he taught painting and drawing in the School of Art at the University of Washington until 1998. In 2008, Dailey’s work was the subject of a retrospective, curated by John Olbrantz, at the Hallie-Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. After retiring from the School of Art at University of Washington, Michael Dailey continued to live and work in Seattle until his death in 2009.