SKY RIVER GROUP VISUAL ARTS: When East meets West, the result is peace During her long and fruitful career, Pat Steir has held a running conversation with art history, East and West, but it's as much about meaning as about form. Waterfalls, the nominal subject of her abstract paintings since the late 1980s, are rich in metaphor and symbolism --- of gravity as the power of natural forces man must accept, of life as constant flux, of the flow of time. While preparing paintings for a recent exhibition, the New York artist took up drawing after a 10-year hiatus as a way to study the horizontal movement of water. Six pieces from the resulting "Sky River Group" are on view at Kiang Gallery. Although they are large and dramatic, they still possess the intimacy that one associates with drawing, though they are more interesting as a group than as individual objects. Steir used the same format and technique for each. She lays a 24-by-60-inch sheet of white paper marked with a penciled grid on the floor and drips, splatters, smudges, stains --- and rarely, rarely brushes --- the ink and wax and candle soot upon it. The drawings are all spare, with a low-key palette --- plum, ocher, black, brown --- subordinated to the dramatic play of line and shape. But each work has a different character. "Sky River Group I" pairs a sooty accumulation of marks that looks like a furry whisper and one that suggests a clot of exploding magma. In "Sky River Group IV," a black line scampers across the sheet atop a discontinuous series of blobbier shapes. The allusive series provokes a profusion of images and thoughts. The imagination spies a snake slithering along the center line of "IX." The marks of the brush in "V" are intimations of a Chinese landscape. The juxtaposition of the precise, implacable grid and these swooshes and stains brings to mind such oppositions as control vs. letting go and order vs. unpredictability. Writing in Art in America magazine, G. Roger Denson connects Steir's work to a group of ink-flinging eighth-century Chinese painters she has studied and to the philosophy of Taoism, which Denson describes as "a system of finding man's path of cooperation with the natural world." Steir's method also links her to Western action painting. This East-meets-West aesthetic celebrates the art-making process as a form of meditation. The energetic drawings start off by recording time as motion and end up taking artist and viewer into the realm of the timeless. The verdict: Engaging meditations on art and time. Through Nov. 30, 2002. 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; noon-5 p.m. Saturdays. Price range: $3,000-$12,000. Kiang Gallery, 1923 Peachtree Road. 404-351-5477. - Catherine Fox Atlanta Journal-Constitution Friday, November 8, 2002