On the Wall (detail) (after Hondecoeter), 2010, oil on canvas.
be shades of tan and gray. In short, we
respond with excitement over color, we
navigate away from the colorless. If such
an explanation holds weight with our fullyevolved selves today, what would this mean
when looking at the art of Shelley Reed?
For starters, it may mean that the highimpact first impression associated with
spectacular color has been dispensed with,
not even sought by the artist. Instead,
black and white brings shapes and lines to
the foreground and establishes distinctions
with utter clarity. That clarity speaks to
order, and order in turn to reason, which
is distinct from emotion. In black and
white, Reed has made de Hondecoeter
less theatrical and operatic, which is a way
of making his work more “realistic.” As
realistic, anyway, as such a scene can be.
appreciation for this kind of commentary.
One impressive de Hondecoeter painting
is his dynamic Turkey Fighting a Rooster in
the State Museum, Schwerin, Germany.
A stately peacock turns his back on two
furiously fighting fowls: a turkey and a
rooster. With feathers flustered, the cock
and the turkey trade barbs as hens gather
around and look on. What makes them,
in part, stand-ins for people is the refined
garden setting. In this environment, should
they not be better behaved? Of course not.
They are wild game. As are the owners of
this estate, who likewise engage in warfare.
De Hondecoeter seems to be saying that
wealth and privilege are not assurances of
civility; animals will be animals.
Reed gives us a version of this painting that
is in many respects the same painting, yet
one that feels in all ways contemporary and
thereby becomes a very different painting.
Her deliberate move to black and white is
deeply counterintuitive; we expect an orgy
of color from such a scene. There are exotic
birds, classical architecture, and a cloudfilled sky. Countering this expectation is
an article of faith in contemporary art.
That is, if the average viewer has a certain
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expectation, it must mean that expectation
has existed a long time and has lost its
power of unpredictability. Reed shocks the
viewer with her fiendishly simple plot of
taking away the main embellishment of
seeing, color.
And, we realize in looking at her work
that color is, indeed, an embellishment.
Human beings do not need color to
navigate the world. Line, texture, shape,
distance—anything in the material world
can be cognitively processed via black and
white. Knowing this begs a very important
question: if color vision seems to have no
obvious purpose, why would such a thing
evolve over millions of years? In fact, there
is no