In a small, ordinary house on the outskirts of Taos, New Mexico, Bill
Rane conjures visions. It seems an odd thing for this weathered western man to do. Bill Rane has always
been somewhat of an anomally.
The son of a logger, Rane grew up on a dry land farm in Idaho.
As a young man he was more concerned with hauling hay than making art, but even then he had a hunch that the world was not
what everyone said it was. He believed there was some magical substance behind the mask of reality, and when he turned
to painting at the age of fourteen, he was determined to use art to help him find that magic.
Engaged in a personal quest, Rane had little reason to concern himself
with the changing fashions of the American art scene. While many contemporary artists eschewed representation, Rane
filled his canvases with recognizable figures and objects. When art became hard-edged and angry, Rane persisted in using
the sensuous curve and dancing arabesque. When other artists turned their backs on the public, Rane continued
to believe that everyone had a right to find joy and hope in a work of art. Using the act of painting and
paint itself as his only mentor, Rane concerned himself solely with finding and revealing his personal visions.
As in any vision, the first thing one notices in Rane's current work
[circa 1979] is light-- light shimmering from the surfaces, seeping out from each translucent layer, light that is almost
palpable. To produce luminous light with paint is a formidable feat. But there is more than the technical
challenge that drives Rane to try to "get light in a pctiure better than anyone ever has." In his work, light has both
visual and symbolic functions.
Rane floods his scenes with a light so bright that it all but obliterates
color, form and space. Color is reduced to the palest of hues, forced to whisper amidst the overwheliming clamor
of white. The objects and figures have little mass (what modeling there is is very shall) or weight. Though a
fairly deep space is built up through the inclusion of multiple layers, the transparency of the layers and thier tendency
to interpenetrate makes the space hard to define. The absence of shadows further confuses the issue. We
are left with a pictorial space that has depth at one moment and no depth the next, forms that are distinguishable but
insubstantial, and colors that almost lose themselves in iridescence.
Time, Rane has said, is the best artist. Many of his favorite images
are those affected by time: ancient plaster frescoes almost obligerated by wind and rain, stains on the walls and ceilings
of abandoned buildings, objects that are only memories of what they once were. Rane simulated the effects of time
by using light to remove the sharp edges of "now" from his scenes. As a result, light also effaces time itself.
Given a world without corporeal substance, where time and space are indistinct,
we must surmise that Rane is presenting us with something other than ordinary reality. Clearly, we must view his paintings
as symbols, as dreams, as visions of an ideal. To gain some insight into what that ideal is for the artist, we can look
at the way he produces his paintings.
"I start by trying to stay free from preconceptions," he says, "to remember
that I don't know anything. This leaves me open to receive. If I can empty my mind, a thought will come riding
in like a prince in a touring car."
Trying to remain in a receptive state of mind, Rane begins to paint,
a process he describes as "throwing out a complicated web of lines." Then he tries to find something in this Rorschach--like
beginning, reading it "like a shamn reading bones."
Once a painting has been generated, Rane sets it aside. What seemed
pleasing one day, seems vacious to him the next. "Anything that is all of one mind," he explains, "lacks the opposition
and contrast that gives a painting depth." To intoduce that depth, he literally attacks his pictures: slashing
them, cutting them into pieces, rearranging the elements until he has violated the compositional tactics he feels most comfortable
with, obliterating whole sections. "I give it the whole onslaught," he says, "let everyting attack it until I'm left
with a tragedy."
When the painting is in chaos, the preliminaries are over and Rane is
ready to go to work. "Each painting is a battle," he says, "I can't just leave ugliness alone; I have to find a resolution.
So, I work with it until it's beautiful again. I consider a painting beautiful when I have grappled with it and won.
Beauty is only sentimental and insipid without that struggle."
Rane's concept of beauty is both eclectic and deeply spiritual.
He is fond of the architecture of Guatemala and Mexico; these forms enter his paintings. Chagall and Matisse are particularly
strong influences and echoes of their styles resonate through his own work. He shamelessly uses anything that he loves,
then fuses it into his own repertoire. Then like the icon painters of old, he repeats the same motifs again and again.
The Madona is a particularly pervasive motif, one that appeared in Rane's
work for years. She is to him, light light, a symbol of life. And life, above all, is his theme.
Each time Rane makes a painting, it's literally grappling with ugliness
and chaos. Figuratively, however, he is grappling with death. He feels a kinship with the tomb painters who used to
decorate the dark walls with the most beautiful images they could fashion. They believed that if they could make the
tomb beautiful enough life would be regenerated. At least part of Rane believes that too.
What then can we make of his visions? They are peculiar indeed.
The figures are unperturbed, but also unresponsive. Male and female seldom touch. They have no feet to walk upon.
There is a sense of stasis, of waiting, or of unbecoming in his new works. There is little or no action. The symbols
converge only to show us one engimatic moment.
We cannot sink into Rane's paintings to rest: there is nothing
to lean on. Neither can we find in them an emotional catharsis; all traces of the battle have been removed.
What we can find is solace. For as we fight our own battles and seek our own visison, Rane's paintings are there
to remind us that beauty can overcome chaos, that hope is stronger than despair, and that light and life are everywhere, shimmering
behind the mask of reality.
