How Kate Gray's intuition takes over in 'New Next' exhibit at Orr Street Studios

Tumbling out of certain mouths at certain moments, the word "next" expresses impatience.

The spring-loaded syllable is barked at people standing in line, sounds the cry of children hurrying to grow up, articulates the rushing-river thoughts of someone who wants to be anywhere but where they are.

When Kate Gray pronounces "next," the word sounds refreshing, liberating even.

A vibrant mainstay on the Columbia arts scene, Gray's new Orr Street Studios exhibit — Discovering the New Next: The Creative Process of Letting Go of Stress — represents "just the beginning" of her own delving into "next" and finding freedom there.

Comprised of paintings, drawings and other artifacts of inspiration, the show illustrates how it might look to trust your intuition, then keep a conversation with that intuition going.

Mile markers on the creative path

Approaching what she called a "milestone birthday" last fall, Gray and her husband pointed their car toward a Colorado vacation. Gray couldn't necessarily envision what would come next in her life, she testified, but felt the worries and insecurities of that moment and of her creative life piled up all around her.

Almost with each passing mile, Gray sensed her stresses "fading away," she said. Taking highway speeds through Kansas, blurred Midwestern landscapes represented a releasing — a leaving behind — of internalized concerns that no longer suited or served her, she added.

Upon reaching Colorado, moments seemed to expand, offering clarity. The way light and air played off the mountains. An immersion into hot springs, and the chance to absorb the sweet hum of stories and lives being lived within sight and earshot. The way body and soul aligned in response to touch during a massage.

Gray wanted to bottle these phenomena and release them into her art and the rest of her life.

"The place I want to be and want to constantly live is stepping back from it all, and seeing it from a grounded place, a quiet place," she said.

Placing pen on paper, initially nothing came. Gray consciously surrendered to intuition, letting each line travel where it wished, she said. The instinct and motion she recorded formed sketches that are representational and abstract and somehow none of the above; they resemble the figure, but also read like topographical maps of inspiration and desire.

The hand, it seems, is doing what a breath or a heartbeat does.

"I was drawing the release. I was drawing how I felt in that moment," Gray said. "Those drawings translated to me — they were written in my language."

Creasing the borders of Missouri and returning to real life, as it were, Gray sought ways to recast those drawings with paint and canvas. But she tightened up.

Gray had other layers of expectation to shed: the "standard" ways of painting, and how someone else might approach the work. She began asking herself a series of whys and why-nots: why couldn't she simply use pencil on canvas? Why not avoid conventional framing of her work?

"Why can’t it hang like air in someone’s house as opposed to firmly planted on the wall?" she said.

Indeed, the work on display at Orr Street Studios exists at various angles, comprising their own layers and textures, leading viewers through the exhibit with a certain grace. The lightness of being is not unbearable here.

A corner of Kate Gray's world

Gray's exhibit represents an integrated display of inspiration. Paintings and the drawings which aroused them live together in space. Gray also leaves a record of the artists, writers and musicians who helped usher each piece into being: from Taylor Swift to Rilke, the Indigo Girls to Georgia O'Keeffe.

One key corner of the exhibit recreates the spirit of Gray's studio with an extended poem, color palettes and replications of her original sketches.

And the actual paintings themselves are remarkable. Each begins with a sort of underpainting in which color has its say. But across these fields, the eye is drawn to a remarkably free style of mark-making, the brushstrokes like jazz.

In many pieces, the figure resides — but it is the figure unbound, the figure becoming a "seamless" piece of everything, Gray said.

Gray also pursued an intuitive approach to color mixing, which is evident throughout. Distilled sunset pinks, deep rusts and electric oranges appear, feeling at least like previously unseen colors.

The work arrives with a "dreamlike" quality, Orr Street Studios executive director Dawn Warren said. And the gentle looseness of it does suggest that release found in dreams, when we cannot help but give in to the vision and our lack of control.

"When I write, I know. When I draw — after I draw — I know," Gray said. "So I’m letting go of the stress and the supposed-tos. It’s my hand."

The new next

Naturally, Gray has little interest in laying down principles or creeds to guide others into their new next. Rather, in displaying her experience, her language for pushing through stress, she wants viewers to find their own.

She remembers feeling inspired to move in the presence of other artists' exhibits, responding with hope that "I can use my hand and heart to do a little bit of that. Sometimes it doesn’t have anything to do with art."

Posted on one gallery wall, a large sheet of white paper bears an invitation: "What is your new next? The universe wants to know." As of Wednesday afternoon, two responses found a home there: one spoke at an existential level, of ridding fear and replacing it with love; the other detailed a specific vision for offering sanctuary to people and other living things.

Here, what's possible for Gray sparks what's possible for anyone passing through Orr Street's halls — a slow and free series of nexts.

Discovering the New Next runs through Oct. 28. Visit https://www.orrstreetstudios.com/ for more details and open gallery hours.

Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at [email protected] or by calling 573-815-1731. He's on Twitter @aarikdanielsen.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: How Columbia's Kate Gray dives into 'New Next' in latest art exhibit