The Estate of Jennifer Wynne Reeves

Download Exhibition Catalogue of The Line Talked Back

I loved to draw, especially animals, like a lot of girls, but I hated dolls or anything to do with dolls.  There was a great deal of turmoil in my family life from an early age. I think I expressed this by making drawings of animals being hunted and dying from gunshot wounds. I almost never drew the humans, just the animals and the guns at the edge of the picture with little balls flying through the air.^[1]

In 1993, Reeves completed a number of acrylic on board paintings as part of her Struggle series. Contemplating order and disorder, Reeves’ exasperated marks in somber black, browns, and blues transport us to the eye of the storm.

In over 100 paintings in acrylic, gouache, and oil on paper, panel, wood, and board, Jennifer Wynne Reeves created surreal bucolic landscapes to celebrate the particularities of place. Working in figuration and abstraction, Reeves learned to paint in two languages: one reserved for white picket fences, wooden barns, and fields of yellow and green, and the other for her characters who traversed these pastoral lands. Reeves called these characters her “guys,” some striped or blobbed, others gooped or strewn about her signature horizon line. The Place series, as she named it, put Reeves on the map and set her reputation as a “painter’s painter” - in her hands, a single tube of paint could become a blade of grass, the wood grain on a barn wall, or a multicolor blitz smudged into the scene.

In 1997, as part of the Place series, Reeves continued playing with surface and texture by painting birthday cakes. Twenty-five years later, the waxy candles wait for a birthday wish and the thick, fluffy ribbons of frosting still look good enough to eat.

In her Initial Impulse series, Reeves paid tribute to the very intuition and instinct that brings people together and projects to life. Experimenting with new ways of illustrating waves, grass, stones, and cloudy skies, Reeves would lay clumpy, clay-like acrylic in piles next to watered-down paint droplets. She built up lines of paint, thin and thick, crimped and smoothed, letting their colors fade into one another. The highly motivated, insatiably curious Reeves would also revisit paintings to rework their compositions, as seen in Initial Impulse: Singing Lines (1999) and Initial Impulse: The Lines Are Everywhere (2000). The Initial Impulse series was the subject of a fall 2018 exhibition at BravinLee programs in New York City.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Jennifer Wynne Reeves participated in a number of solo and group shows across New York City. Upon returning to her studio, tucked away in the small Delaware River town of Callicoon, New York, Reeves realized she had a lot to say about the way the so-called Art World worked. The witty and outspoken artist began adding text to her paintings, turning them into satirical comic strip frames that mocked dealers and critics alike. Some were bold and brazen, like Liberal Minded Art Dealer Gets Drunk, Talks too Loud (2000), with large text bubbles that demanded attention. Later works, like Art Critic Visits A Studio, Presents His Wiener For A Show, were more mischievous, using teeny, tiny text that required visitors to step closer to the work and squint, only to step back with a loud “ha!”, a small chuckle of embarrassment, or cover their eyes in disbelief. In Reeves’s life, art, and writing, nothing was off limits: there were no taboos and no need to feel ashamed around money, sex, or politics.

When she wasn’t poking fun at critics and dealers, Jennifer Wynne Reeves was busy learning how to figure the abstract and create virtually infinite realms for her “stick guys,” “line guys,” and “dot guys” (the names she gave to her stacked globs of paint). Reeves, who had a knack for interior design and painted the walls of every home she lived in, built little rooms for her “guys.” Adopting the traditional one-point perspective, Reeves painted the floors to resemble real hardwood, added castle-like stone walls and bold, funky wallpaper, and sometimes even included furnishings like camelback sofas and shag rugs. Once she set the stage for her cast of characters, Reeves insisted that the walking, talking, thinking “guys” would continue on, embarking on their own representational journeys.

As a child, Jennifer Wynne Reeves rolled in the dandelions and kept real hay in her toy horse barn.^[1] As an adult, Reeves lived and walked along the Delaware River almost every evening before coming in for dinner. A voyager at heart, Reeves was incredibly drawn to nature and set out on many road trips to explore the American landscape. Armed with her camera and a suitcase full of handmade “guy” figurines, Reeves would drive for hours, days, and weeks on end in search of new terrain. Her time on the road inspired many lighthearted road sign paintings that warned her “guys” about upcoming “ISSUES,” to beware the “BIG MESS” in five miles, and welcome them to “AWKWARDTOWN.” While on these trips, Reeves found herself climbing up snowy mountains, walking across the rocks on Maine’s coast, and getting lost in Arizona deserts, stopping only to set up her “guys” and snap the perfect shot. Once photographed, Reeves would return to her studio and occasionally, as seen in Boarder Crossing (Maine), decide to paint, draw, and write over the images to add yet another dimension to her work. Even when her cancer diagnosis slowed down her travels, Reeves continued her set-up photography projects from home and produced dozens of archival inkjet prints featuring her “guys” in handmade dioramic worlds.

In the last two years of her life, amidst cancer treatments, doctor’s appointments, and three brain surgeries, Jennifer Wynne Reeves leaned into her spirituality and found solace in her art. She painted every animal under the sun with a fierce brush as she had in childhood, only now imbuing them with the wisdom granted by the passage of time. In a Facebook comment, Reeves summarized one painting as such:

“[In Fire, Fall, Flight, Forward,] the rabbit's life is preserved or about to be by the abstract figure on the right. this figure is like the angel, the art spirit, and it has an arm protruding from the picture plane. I’m thinking the arms of abstraction stand for spiritual power or strength, even better, action. or something like that.”^[1]