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Dallas gallery showcases abstract, colorful paintings by artist Meg Cranston

New Dallas outpost of LA’s Meliksetian Briggs gallery explores color contrasts.

From impressionism on, modern art has sometimes been as much about process as product: how a work is created, and how we perceive it. Recent works by Los Angeles artist Meg Cranston, now on display at the new Dallas branch of LA’s Meliksetian Briggs gallery, transfigure the most basic of a painter’s tools: the palette where colors are squirted out of tubes, to be juxtaposed or mixed.

Fourteen of 20 paintings here are titled Palette or Palette Painting. They range from relatively intimate scale, with random blobs and smears of pastel and darker oils on paper, to larger, bolder and more organized acrylics on canvas. The decorative whimsy of the smaller works is particularly appealing.

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Gray backgrounds echo Cranston’s experiments with gray paper for mixing her paints. “It allowed me to see the color and its value more accurately,” she has written. “I liked the change so well I started keeping my palettes and pinning them to the wall … I began to make what I call palette paintings.”

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These freehand takes on color field painting represent only the last two years in Cranston’s quite varied output of paintings, sculptures and installations, displayed in modern art museums on both coasts. The title of the Dallas show, “A Line Has Two Sides,” is explained by a minimalist work of that title, with slender horizontal black lines bisecting each of three gallery walls.

Meg Cranston: 'Palette Painting No. 8' at Meliksetian Briggs
Meg Cranston: 'Palette Painting No. 8' at Meliksetian Briggs(Scott Cantrell)
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Through April 8 at Meliksetian Briggs, 150 Manufacturing St. - #214. 323-828-4731, meliksetianbriggs.com.