David Reed was born in 1946. He grew up in California. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Reed College in 1968 and after graduation, studied with Philip Guston in New York.
He’s an American contemporary artist and his influences range from Renaissance to New York School. His paintings are known for images of large brush strokes and bright colors although he did paint in black and white as well.
The choice of shape and hues of his vertical and horizontal paintings mimic celluloid films, channeling engagement between physicality of the paintings and the illusion they create. Through formalistic qualities, Reed plays with layers of time and memory, the actual and virtual.
David Reed wrote about his experience in his early twenties when he was drawn to the landscape of the Southwestern United States in his article “Media Baptisms.” While staying in the desert, he went on a hike and found a cave. He took a drink of water from a small spring running along the wall of the cave. Just at that moment, he had déjà vu and realized that while he’s never been in the cave, his memory of the cave was from the film “The Searchers” by John Ford. This discovery made him aware of authentic versus virtual memory and play of reality.
He likes the format of the film because it captures the uncanny. And in his paintings, he captures the same. And what he means by the uncanny is what the film captures. Any normal experience, once captured by the medium of film becomes uncanny, or significant because of the existence of the tool of recordation.
Reed drew from Tzvetan Todorov’s study, “The Fantastic, a Structural Approach to a Literary Genre” for three requirements for the fantastic. The first is unresolved ambiguity between the supernatural and a rational explanation. In his paintings, there’s an ambiguity between the physicality of the painting and the illusionism. The second is an identification of the reader with the hero’s hesitation between interpretations. Reed calls entry into the uncanny at the cave a “gesture.” The gesture that gets the viewer into his paintings is through the eyes. The eyes are greeted by ambiguous gestures or shapes that suggest movement and Reed hopes will lead to the uncanny or the fantastic. That is why his paintings are vertical and horizontal extremes because the viewer can’t take in the whole painting at once. When the eyes are focused on one area of the painting, the peripheral vision moves.
The third requirement for the fantastic is that the work not have poetic or narrative interpretations because it’ll lose its ambiguity. If there’s specificity in the subject of the painting, then the experience becomes the rational rather than the fantastical.
The viewer is drawn in by the colors and shapes of seemingly quick brush strokes. David Reed refers to his brushwork as gestures. But in carefully planning and designing these gestural shapes to bring out materiality and to give the appearance of movement and spontaneity, Reed ends up doing the opposite of what the Abstract Expressionists did. Abstraction Expressionists emphasized the physicality of the act of painting over the painting itself, where the act of painting is the artwork, and the resulting work is the circumstantial evidence of the art that existed before the genesis of the painting. By painting spontaneity with deliberation, Reed is playing with time. He’s giving an illusion of a moment in time by taking months and years to complete his paintings. Similarly, the use of the medium of celluloid film is also a play on time, filming a movie on celluloid takes time and planning to give an effect of spontaneous depiction of action and motion.
It’s not just the illusion of abbreviated brush strokes that he plays with time, it’s also back to the shape of his paintings. With his extreme horizontal and vertical paintings, he’s referring to the shape, materiality, and purpose of celluloid films. With the extreme vertical and horizontal paintings, it’s impossible for the viewer to focus on the entire painting. And it takes time for the viewer to sequentially, take in different spots of the paintings at a time. When the viewer looks at one area of the painting, there is movement in their peripheral vision. Where there’s movement, there’s passage of time, even if it’s a moment.
With the movement in the periphery, David Reed takes the viewer back to the purpose of celluloid film, depiction of movement and passage of time. Similar to film, the effect of light in his paintings is artificial. He does this by using hues instead of value in his paintings.
His TV size paintings offer a multi-layered approach to depiction of the materiality or lack of in media. With the series specifically entitled TV-size paintings, he’s referring to the television screen we’re accustomed to seeing in the context of our domiciles. Adding an additional consideration is that many films released in the theater are later shown on TV, the viewer either harkens back to memory of seeing the same movie on a public movie screen, and adjusts to the viewing through a personalized smaller screen, or if the viewer is watching an old film for the first time on television, then their perception of the narrative and depiction are a different iteration of the original film. This brings into the question the original intent of the film maker as well as questions of authenticity of the authorship as well as the viewership. Viewing the same film on a public movie screen versus on a privately owned television is similar to how a personalized pan pizza for one is much smaller than a large pizza designed to be consumed by many.
David Reed’s paintings are just so darn pretty. The movement of the bright colors and artificial light are entrancing, similar to the entrancement the viewer experiences in a theater or by watching television. The eye is drawn in through the gesture of purposefully designed movement. David Reed’s recollection of drinking water in a cave was from “The Searchers” is a memory recall from another’s fabrication, another’s vision. I’m reminded of a lecture on filmmaking about “The Wizard of Oz.” The lecturer discussed Dorothy’s yearning and quest to find her home. But the home in the Wizard of Oz is one of artificial construct. In watching, empathizing, and identifying with Dorothy, the viewer too yearns for home. But the home that the viewer yearns for is not their own, it’s for a home that can only be found on screen. And in that sense, Hollywood is manufacturing consumers to return to the screen again and again, in search of a home they’ll never find.
Similarly, by utilizing the motifs of celluloid film and television, David Reed entices and entrances the viewer to enter his works by the gesture of deliberate brushstroke designs, making the viewer lose a sense of time, similar to watching media in a theater or on television. In our world defined by media and our reality experienced on screens of all sizes and shapes, David Reed’s paintings remain relevant and questioning in their beauty. If you wish to see more of his art, link to his website is David Reed Art
