Bibliography (selected)
Elegant Shadows - Julie Reeves Recent Paintings, Robyn Daw, Eyeline, Spring 2001 number 46, p44-45
Wallflowers, Eliza Compton, Not Only Black + White, Issue 58 2001, p13
Blur - Reality and Realism in Picture Making (ex cat), Sally Brand, Redland Art Gallery, 2004, p13-15
Inclination, Dr Ihor Holubizky, Inclination - Paintings by Julie Reeves (ex cat), Redland Art Gallery, 2003, p1-3
Inclinatio Sensualis, Robyn Daw, Inclination - Paintings by Julie Reeves (ex cat), Redland Art Gallery, 2003, p4-5
Dark Garden (ex cat), Susan Rothnie, Jan Murphy Gallery 2007
Julie Reeves, Robyn Daw, Acquisitions 2007 - 2015 Logan Art Collection, 2015 p32 - 33
Additional reviews coming soon.
Image 1 courtesy of Vogue Living December2003. Photo of Chemistry courtesy of Jan Murphy Gallery.
Image 2 and 3 courtesy of Arts Queensland Cultural Policy Report 2002.
Reeves, Susan Rothnie, Jan Murphy Gallery 2005 p70-73
Catalogue text for “Inclination”, survey exhibition at the Redland Art Gallery 2003
INCLINATION
text by Dr Ihor Holubizky
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, so someone said and it has been repeated enough to become a folkloric truism. 1 Writing about painting, however, can be like dancing around in circles. Sooner or later you will return to the same spot and barely know it. Rather than engage in the circle dance defense of painting, American art critic Jerry Saltz declared that “painting is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented, and among the most effective ways to alter reality, see it better, or even invent a new one. Painting gives permission, it doesn’t ask for it: it not only explores consciousness, it changes it.” 2 Painting is not a strategy, even though some use it for strategic ends. Painting happens because it is second nature for an artist. Painting works when the mind, hand and eye operate with common purpose, whereas the strategist denies the hand and wishes to taint the eye of the viewer, betraying the trust between maker and viewer.
Julie Reeves’s paintings work with that common purpose but the route is neither easy nor predictable. An earlier example is worth mentioning. Betrayal is the title and subject of Elwyn Lynn’s Blake Prize winning painting of 1957. The style tells us that it is the 1950’s, yet the subject is 2000 years old - Peter denying Jesus as the cock crows. It is more than a barnyard painting. But the cock is also a symbol of the French Revolution, and therefore can signify the betrayal of revolutionary ideals, and what followed, the dictatorship of enlightenment (Napoleon). Because we do not have a complete operator’s manual for culture (if such a thing could ever exist or be updated), symbolic meaning can be lost or become indecipherable over time, and thus different interpretations will appear and disappear. 3
The title of Julie Reeves’s exhibition is Inclination, which she describes as “a tendency, a natural disposition towards a certain goal, almost an instinct”, and notes that it is akin to “insinuation”. Paintings can insinuate, as well as demonstrate and illustrate. Yet the insinuation or inclination is a slippery slope. There is a body of work that appears to insist - paintings that incorporate floral motifs used in fabric and wallpaper, but they are not necessarily about wallpaper or fabric. Once it is painted, it is a painting. 4 In Demand, the eye may only see and admire the pictorial qualities of the motif, not the irresolute inclination, when in fact the work presents several visual paradoxes. None of the floral motifs are regular, and diminish in size from right to left. The surface is varnished, creating a glare that repels the eye (most of Reeves’s paintings have some type of treated surface). The two dominant colours in this series are red and green, which Reeves calls unnatural, an intensity of (these) colours that does not occur in nature. They appear as if bathed in a red or green light, rather than “being” red or green subject matter. Red-green deficiency is also the most common form of colour blindedness. To extrapolate, in Reeves’s use of these colours, it is how we see as much as what we see. 5
There are paintings in Reeves’s ouevre that have no discernible image/subject. Confess (another loaded title) is a taut veil of chiffon (another use of fabric for Reeves) over a stretcher and drops of PVA glue on the diaphanous surface. She continues with similar minimal screen works - see-through paintings - that generate moire effects, flickering and shimmering as you walk by. Chasing the subject-image on that elusive ground leads us to the circle. We can’t be sure where “we are” in the picture, and therefore must “get lost” in the painting if it is going to have meaning for us. Susceptible is a hybrid work, painted on blanket - the weave is visible- and covered with a fine chiffon netting. The width (430cm) is that of a medium sized wall of a modern apartment, or the wall itself. Reeves made note of commentary from a Mark Rothko documentary - “You need large scale for intimacy” - and elaborated, “I am also working on fairly large, mostly minimal pieces with small scaled, detailed fragments of pattern interspersed across the surface, and with the scale of the patterns as they appear on fabric or wallpaper in the domestic environment.” This is more than a Pop Art elevation of the banal. Reeves states that the feeling of intimacy is increased because her work can be related to the everyday interior. “I aim for surprises… hopefully this might change the ordinary and familiar into something more interesting, even peculiar.” 6
Confess could be “about” the trace of the non-objective, but our mind and eyes don’t work that way. We are creatures of habit and need to locate subject: identify it - in this case, the pattern motif that appears in three passages across the surface. The expanse of ground (the non-subject area) can be read as “expression” or a condition of emptiness. If we suppress the urge to define the subject - deny our instinct, as if looking for the forest through the trees - the painting unfolds in a different way. The motif could be incidental or a fleeting experience, and the ground takes on prominences as a “eternal reality”, a subject expressed through shadow and tonality across the surface. The dual-composition is quixotic, mercurial, but one perspective should inform the other. In Fluent, the motif is “embossed” in polyurethane, ghost-like and related (another way of seeing) to the droplet apparition - the “revenge of the subject” on the eye of the beholder.
Playing one thing against the other is a matter of discipline more than the promotion of one thing - “my work is about…”. Other works tell us more. Chemistry and Complicity have a pattern-motif on padded (upholstered) object like surfaces. Her small format works are also object-like, with deep stretchers and the motif/painting wrapped around the edge. The clearly rendered pattern works - with light/daylight grounds, such as the perpetrate series - have a sinister quality, as if taken from the background of a James Audubon engraving (American 1785 - 1851) and mixed with an Alfred Hitchcock playfulness, or the “peculiar” as Reeves noted. 7 These are impressions, not absolute descriptions, and Reeves does not propose a perfect, hermetic world. Better to say that Reeves exercises her inclination - an inventiveness that is more than a variation on a theme - and the goal remains painting.