The television show "Seinfeld," as so famously proclaimed, was about "nothing," wherein lay its genius. Artist Andrew Rose says his new solo exhibit, "Kaleidoscope," is also about "nothing — but art."

Each of the show’s seven canvases, which include a 5-by-15-foot mural, consists most noticeably of brush strokes, hundreds and hundreds of them, in varying colors, sizes and shapes. One might be tempted to find figures in there, like one of those stereogram puzzles, and it’s easy to see why Rose says the exhibit draws on rain, which "is something that cannot be held or grabbed, but can be apprehended." Rose did a previous series of paintings on rain for the exhibit "Liminal" four years ago.

"Each one of these million brush strokes is a meditation on really nothing. It’s a meditation on really nothing but that brush stroke, on creating the next layer of color or the next relationship of color," he said.

Many of the works in the exhibit started out with Rose not having any idea of what he was painting. "Danae," for example, refers to the Greek goddess giving birth to Perseus "in a shower of golden light." Rose said it began as merely putting brush strokes of paint, including some gold paint, on the canvas.

"Somewhere about halfway through, I realized what the painting was about," he said. "And then I was able to enhance the golden light, to take the painting to where it really needed to go."

Another piece, "Fiesta," was even more perplexing. The hundreds of pink and red brush strokes baffled him until the night before his deadline when he turned it upside down. "When all the brush strokes and all the energy went up, it was what I’d been looking for," he said, "I painted this painting to Cuban music, flamenco music and a lot of Latin guitar and rhythms, and had been drinking red wine and having a good time."

It might be unusual to turn a painting upside down, but Rose was willing to go with what the painting told him.

"You really have to listen to the painting. You can’t have any ego when you make paintings sometimes, because if you pay attention to what’s going on on the canvas and you react to that, you’re going with that energy and you’re rewarded. If you fight against it, then it becomes full of tension."

Paintings with Hawaiian themes seem made for Rose’s style. A painting called "A‘a" (a type of lava) is a brilliant fusion of sun and earth tones. "That painting almost painted itself," said Rose, who admitted to having some trepidation about taking on such a familiar and spiritual theme. Similarly, "Kamakanimomi," a huge mural of blue to yellow brush strokes, immediately evokes swirling winds blowing rain over the water.

"The idea is that when you sit and look at it for a bit, it moves and gives you the opportunity to experience not only the movement of color, but of space and light," he said.

Rose, who opened his gallery six months ago, is a Los Angeles native who visited Hawaii often as a child. He resolved to move here after 12 years of living through New York winters, eventually getting a job as head of the art department at Island Pacific Academy and teaching painting at the Academy Art Center at Linekona (now the Hono­lulu Museum of Art School).

He said his gallery will exhibit work "that has significant content, important content and … content that’s significant to Hawaii."

"There’s a certain type of art that gets sold to travelers and tourists and that is often a keepsake or a decorative element," he said. "There’s a place for that. There are great artists who do nothing but create beautiful art. There’s nothing wrong with beauty."

His gallery, however, aims to work with artists "who have matured, who have been in the biennials, who’ve shown at international museums, who’ve established themselves as career artists. There’s a different sort of path for people who have dedicated themselves to working at the top of their game in terms of developing imagery that has significant or important or noteworthy content, on top of just being beautiful or interesting to look at."