COMING SOON
Animal Instinct: Paintings by Shelley Reed
May 16 – September 14, 2014
Up a Tree (after Snyders), 2005, oil on canvas.
Will South, chief curator
Shelley Reed looks at and listens to the
past. She has studied the elegant discipline
of old master painting, and is enchanted
by images of animals behaving like people:
eating, fighting, playing, working, and
simply being. Reed has found these visual
stories, rich in complex commentary on
human nature, worth retelling.
The question for the artist has been how
best to touch a contemporary audience.
Her answer, intuitive and ingenious, has
been to turn the old masters’ approach to
painting inside out. They worked from
black and white toward color; Reed selects
a colorful old master painting and works it
back to black and white. She makes us look
again at older art through the lens of our
own present and optically without color.
The result is magical.
While looking at Shelley Reed’s outsized,
polished, black and white oil paintings
based primarily on 17th- and 18th-century
European precedents, a fair question
might be: why would a contemporary
American artist base her work on such
effete and fanciful work? Weren’t paintings
by Melchior de Hondecoeter, Edward
Landseer, Frans Snyders, and Jean-Baptiste
Oudry basically showpieces commissioned
for wealthy patrons whose tastes veered
toward the opulent and ostentatious?
Well, yes. They were. And yet these same
artists used their opportunity to critique
the very social order that supported
them, and to praise the natural world
so effectively avoided by the aristocracy.
Indeed, artists still do this.
Melchior de Hondecoeter (c. 1636–1695)
is an artist Reed has examined closely. (See
page 4 for an example of his work.) De
Hondecoeter specialized in birds, and it
was written of him that “[De] Hondecoeter
displays the maternity of the hen with as
much tenderness and feeling as Raphael
the maternity of Madonnas.” This ability
to impart a palpable sense of personality to
his birds made him popular with patrons,
in addition to his knack for creating tiny
morality plays with his compositions.
Viewers could measure their own
sophistication against the visual parables
where angry roosters made conspicuous
displays of themselves fighting (the wars
between governments) or birds squawked
in flocks (politicians, party-goers, the
patrons themselves?). Many a patron of
de Hondecoeter would have had a sly
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