On September 2, 2005 the Great Artist and Painter Bill Rane drew his final living breath--merging and fading to both the infinite and the definite.

This site suggests that the time of Bill's death may eventually be seen as coincident with a peculiar and particular turning point in the history of Art because, as he died in his Taos Studio overlooking the complex, lush and unique Taos Valley that he so loved, an entire era culminated and climaxed, along with the life of this extraordinary, unique and talented painter. In life, he transgressed the realms of consciousness from the most base of provincial Western Americana, and its primitive backwaters, to the creation of a vast and powerful artistic vision.

During this, the era of his life, his artistic vision struck some as a "throw back" to an earlier time. But at the time of his death it was already becoming increasingly clear that the here-to-fore prevailing tide of the American Art Elite with its "inside joke" and emphasis on the self-centered goings-on of a particular and rarefied intellectual cadre had reached its high tide and could not sustain itself.

In achieving his important synthesis of color, symbol, myth and allegory, Bill Rane's work, as a destiny, stands along with, or even at the fore of, the work of a very select number of Late Twentieth Century Painters, such as Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler (in much of her work) and perhaps a few others. This select group, through their painting can only ultimately bring forth a certain understanding that successfully challenges, and ultimately, dethrones, America's momentarily prevailing, yet obviously dwindling, Pop Art and OP Art culture with the fundamental truths of the Post Modern Age. Those truths, which Painting cannot side-step--as if Painting alone from all of advances of understanding in the sciences, literature, and the social sciences (and even in so called religious dialogs) was somehow entitled to a unique and special dispensation, center on the comprehensive, universal and evolutionary learning of humanity itself rather than the arrogance of privilege and power.

The insiders missed the real boat, stranded on an island with no escape committed to a path with no anestory and no future. Bill's work proves, in the end, to utterly define Post Modernism as relevant to painting. The enduring, inherently human, constructs of his work show that far from being a "throw back", he is a timeless, and yet evolutionary leader, in American Art. His vision pushes the static notions of the very meaning of art itself past the dead ends and well into the Post Modern Era where painting had not only stubbornly refused to go but somehow protested immunity to the absolute onslaught of advancements first foreshadowed in American academics in its comprehensive advancement in psychology, anthropology, archeology and, perhaps above all, in physics and linguistics. These advances illuminated the human experience as forming around the very way that language, thought, memory and--yes--even visual processing--are both hard wired and soft wired components--the culmination of both DNA and the eons--our very means of understanding and being going far, far beyond the a mere "word" or even a solitary "image".

Those fading offerings of the American Art Establishment are akin to a glass of lukewarm water--a nonstarter with no past and no progeny. All the while Bill was painting in the New Mexico highlands a feast for the mind, soul and, of course, the eye. It was indeed as he had often said all in "the eye of the beholder".

And so, this is a story of man supposedly out of step with his times who turned out to be both far more in touch with the past and much more in tune with the future than the want-to-be alchemists of his time who insisted that lead could not merely be turned to gold but rather that lead was gold already, ab initio, from the very start.

Post Modernism, leaving no room for exceptions--not even for the cute, the obtuse, the sharp edged or the inside jokes of the profoundly clever--finally rises over American Painting returning to the root truths of synthesis and concordance within the larger context of the evolution of human consciousness as a whole. As such Bill's work harmonizes the yet seemingly disparate aspects of the Post Modern Era in exactly the same manner that Braque and Picasso fused the Modern Era, with the fractured elements of the atomic age, in their exploration that became known as 'Cubism'.  Just as the unfolding of Cubism brought the wider society into accord with Modernism, the greatest advancement of consciousness in that time; so it is that Bill's body of work, particularly as that body or work is cataloged, documented, intelligently critiqued and presented to the broader public, will prove to significantly integrate and solidify the Post Modern collective intelligence which is, of course, itself moving and evolving.  Post Modernism's advances in intelligence and consciousness demand that Painting (the processing of special images--not, after all, unlike a language within the mind) must participate within the evolutionary context of our time--just as every other branch of human learning and experience from medicine, law, physics, theology, literature, architecture, theatre, music, politics and philosophy has participated. There is no valid means for painting (and the discourse of images within the mind of the viewer) to, somehow, enjoy a vaccine from the ebb and tide of these Post Modern Truths.

The discrete cadre of an insider clique, who insist that "true" art is defined by a secret--a secret so profound that only they alone are smart enough to conceive it and a secret that they cannot share, not so much because the public is "stupid", but because the "art" would be destroyed in the sharing--miss the mark by unilaterally projecting back upon the so-called 'artist' the target conceived in abstracted, jaundiced and, even, an nihilistic, inward view. These folks sought a symphony of not just one instrument but of only one note and no beat, or rhythm, at all. The narcistic focus on their insisted concept of the creative process so distorted the organic nature of "seeing" that they became their only audience and destroyed any process... in the process... as it were.

There is no doubt that the thaw from such absurdity is already on, at least at the level of museums and curators. The first strong sign of cracks was Tom Wolfe's explosive and seminal expose of the slights of hand and theory. [Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word]. And yet right there beside the cracks of this failed structure, Bill Rane was painting all along; largely unnoticed except for a few evolutionary individuals who already knew that the prevailing visual dialog of the day could not sustain them. Until now, perhaps, only a few have realized the central achievement that Bill brought forth in integrating painting with the advances in understanding enjoyed by many other fields of human understanding and aesthetic.  His is a unifying force bringing paintings "genetics", and painting's 'future' into clear view for this time.

The truth of Bill's role is now ready for prime time not because he caught up with the times but because the times have caught up with him.

And, so it is that the time of Bill's death may well be seen in the future as coordinate in time with the conclusion, and his own ultimate reply to a failed era [an evolutionary dead end] characterized by the forced disjunction, not entirely unlike the diaspora, of American Art from the wider evolutionary tracks of more universally creative traditions, streams, symbolic languages, tribal memories; and cultural threads; and as a reunion of American Artistic Tradition with American Intellectual Post Modernism.

So as he died, looking out across the Taos wetland from his Blueberry Hill studio perch with its amazing vista, surrounded by his work and steeped in the color and odor of paint and turpentine, it might have appeared that he was engulfed in a unique matrix of his singular creation having achieved a personalized success through his life. For him, however, the reality was that he had lived a collective, and universalized, life always harnessed by the greatness of the consciousness of others, not of his own alone at all, and that his achievements, if any, were all about the "team".

Tom Wolfe didn't just expose the game.... he started the revolution. Click here for more discussion of his ground breaking work.