Greg Kucera on Michael Dailey

Greg Kucera responds to this:

Regina, your comment about Dailey’s work is an interesting, if not highly arguable, one. You wrote that “Once he found his style he didn’t change it until forced by health reasons.” I think that Dailey is, instead, one of those subtle, but still convincing artists who changed, not just because of his health issues, but because his mind expanded continuously.

In 30 years or so, Dailey’s work progressed from horizontally banded works about palpable landscape in the 1960s, to vaporously open paintings about light and sky in the 1970s and into the 1980s, to complicated color studies in vertically banded works suggesting differing times and atmospheres into the 1990s, to the complex, nearly Baroque, works about framing space and color and mood in the last 15 years or so.

I view him as a restless, ever evolving artist who changed slowly and
deliberately because that’s what really good artists do with their
work. The change from oil to acrylic in the late 1970s was, to my mind,
nearly seamless and all the more amazing because I could understand how
he painted those airy, atmospheric paintings in oil but never
understood how he did it in acrylic paint.

 Along the way he
discovered, as Alden Mason did, that acrylic can do things that oil
paint doesn’t do easily and he altered his working methods to embrace
those qualities.

I don’t think he “lost his bounce.” I think
he (and his work) bounced along as opportunities for change presented
themselves and where he bounced to was as unpredictable for him as it
has been for other artists who made significant transitions in their
work such as Frank Stella or Richard Diebenkorn.

In the most
abstract terms, Dailey made paintings concerning such ineffable
subjects as atmosphere, mood, and time. He did so with great conviction
and intelligence. That he moved through a difficult life with humor and
grace makes him all the more remarkable a man. As among the most
generous and kind people I’ve ever known, he will be sorely missed
among this community of artists.