West Virginia University Art Professor Paul Krainak, head of the painting program in the Division of Art, has a number of exhibitions opening in the region featuring paintings from the series”Recuperated Spaces”that he completed while on sabbatical during the spring of 2003.

He calls the abstract paintings in the series”an integration of landscape and urban architecture.”They incorporate grids that represent the layout of city streets, floor plans, or interior spaces. In between the grids are textures that come from more natural sources-slate, pieces of wood, building materials, or even folk art and quilts.

“In a way, each painting functions more like a piece of the built environment,”Krainak said.”Not as a symbol or a window, but part of the architecture. I see painting primarily as an extension or conclusion of the wall rather than just a sign or ornament.”

He created about 15 new paintings during his sabbatical that are part of his exhibitions in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

“Recuperated Spaces”was on view at the Museum in the Community in Hurricane, W.Va., Jan. 17 through March 15, sponsored by Ferris Baker Watts, the West Virginia Humanities Council and the West Virginia Commission on the Arts.

A smaller version of the exhibit is currently open through the end of April in Pittsburgh at Springboard, a new visual arts exhibition site in the Terminal Building on the South Side. The architectural firm and project space, owned by architect and artist Paul Rosenblatt and Creative Director Petra Fellaux, selected Krainak’s work as its opening exhibit.

Two of his new paintings also were part of the WVU exhibition titled”Frozen Architecture”at the Creative Arts Center’s Mesaros Galleries during Feb. 13 through March 12. This group exhibition featured contemporary artists, primarily from New York, whose work engages modern architecture.

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During April 19-May 31,”Recuperated Spaces”goes to the Mitchell Museum at the Cedarhurst in Mt. Vernon, Ill., before returning to West Virginia for an exhibition at the Parkersburg Cultural Center of Fine Arts, June 14-Aug. 18.

Krainak who is from Chicago, has lived in West Virginia for the past 15 years-about the same length of time that he has been combining modern architecture and nature in his paintings.

“I’ve had two significant life experiences when it comes to location and dwelling,”he said.”One in an urban area and the other here in Morgantown. I’ve drawn from the environment around me in both places.

“The architecture of Chicago has been a big influence in my work. The buildings of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe are to Chicagoans what the Alleghenies are to natives of Appalachia. Overwhelmingly graceful, they transform their appearance in different kinds of weather and in different light. They’re completely alive and affect almost everything you do, if you pay attention to them.

“I wasn’t concerned about landscape until I moved to West Virginia,”he said.”But, in Morgantown, you can’t ignore the landscape because it blocks your view. At first I felt claustrophobic, but eventually I made sense of being so inundated by nature by representing its surface textures in a series of drawings I did during the 1990s.

“I integrated the undulating planes of the Appalachians into grid forms that stemmed from Chicago’s Bauhaus influenced skyline. Since then, my painting has always balanced passages of what is known as gestural abstraction with a structure made up of straight lines.”

The Pittsburgh City Paper recently described Krainak’s paintings as”patchwork quilts that piece together bits of our landscape.”

The reviewer compared the recent paintings to those he exhibited last year and said”this time they seem quieter, and somewhat broader. Perhaps because he’s pared down the landscape to truly its rawest forms-shape, color, and ambiguous impression. His is an expression of how we think, how we try to make sense of things.”

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described his paintings as spare and abstract, and said”his cool palette is contemporary, but also referential of the 1950s, as in streaked rectangles reminiscent of linoleum or countertops of that time period.”

Krainak said he works in a collage aesthetic and likes to reference textile patterns and quilts in his work. Cubism is definitely a major influence.”I also like working wet paint into wet paint,”he said.”You can get a more spatial surface that way, without relying on classical illusionism. I like to contrast oily and textured surfaces versus the clean and flat. It creates a visual tension that is graphically pleasing to look at and encourages viewers to interpret what they see.

“I favor this kind of image over realism or narrative, because it doesn’t place the viewer in a position of passivity. It respects the public’s intelligence by not conforming to comfortable and threadbare notions of beauty.”

In addition to the new paintings, Krainak also has a writing project planned for the summer as part of his sabbatical. He is putting together a book of critical essays that he has completed during the past 15 years. He is known for his writing about art and has served as contributing editor to Art Papers and the New Art Examiner and as visual arts editor of SoHo Arts Weekly.

Since 1978, he has exhibited his paintings and drawings in galleries, art centers and museums throughout the country. He also served as director of N.A.M.E. Gallery in Chicago.

“The concept of the book is the aesthetic sensibility of non-mainstream artists in the central United States,”he said.”In the art world, there’s New York and Los Angeles and then there’s the rest of the country. I am interested in how communities of artists sustain themselves outside of New York and L.A. It requires a lot of grit and individuality.

“I’m geographically locating the focus of my book in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. This is considered the heartland of America, but it is also isolated from the epicenter of the art world. The experience of culture is different here. This region is independent. Lots of artists here show their work in New York, but they still are at a disadvantage because they can’t ship their work to New York at a moment’s notice, or take advantage of the New York news media.”

Krainak began writing for the New Art Examiner during his last year of graduate school at Northern Illinois University at DeKalb, about an hour away from Chicago. He holds a master of fine arts degree in painting and a master’s in drawing from Northern Illinois University and a bachelor’s degree in studio art from Creighton University.

“I’m fairly comfortable with calling myself an abstract painter,”he said.”I don’t take the term lightly.

“Abstraction is a language significant to the American experience. Architecture and jazz, particularly, were in synch with abstraction in painting and these forms of cultural production have been internalized and popularized. Abstraction, as it relates to the mechanization of culture, is the key ingredient of an American visual aesthetic.”