Gallery Beat
Ted Reed
They don't get much better that Reed when it comes to delivering superbly crafted portraits and representational work at the height of realism.
But technical wizardry is not all that makes a great painting (although it is damned well ahead of whatever is in second place), and Reed also has the mastery of many other tools that a successful painter needs: composition, creativity and that arcane ability to grab something from the subject beyond just its likeness.
The vast majority of contemporary art critics seem to have an agenda that does not include contemporary realism in its portfolio; I'm not one of them.
This anti-realism agenda is somewhat critical. On one hand a superbly talented realist painter is somewhat painted (pun intended) as a traditional throwback to the days of academy rules, and yet when a contemporary painter such as John Currin uses representational painting to deliver ironic or exaggerated visualizations of trite subjects, critics often laud the technical skill of the painter, as if to justify the end result.
I’ve seen John Currin’s works, and Mr. Currin, you’re no Ted Reed.
Reed’s enviable brush follows in the tradition of Vermeer with a healthy dose of Goya thrown in for choice of hues and effects. His subjects are elevated by the light in which they bathe but firmly placed in the corporal world; the light just offers a glint of the sublime.
In September, the Art League Gallery in Alexandria, VA, hosted a solo exhibition of Ted's recent works, entitled "Presence." The show featured both portraits and paintings with broader narrative content and a wider emotional range than most portraits but that still retained a focus on people as subjects.
This was the first time that I had actually seen more than 1-2 of Reed’s works at once, although I had been admiring his works individually over the years at various Alexandria shows. It did not disappoint to see a larger output of Reed’s works and confirmed my impression of his talent and skill.
In Georgetown, Michael Janis, Allegra Marquart, and Tim Tate opened at the end of September at Maurine Littleton's power gallery with a rare opening reception.
I say rare because Littleton doesn’t do too many openings these days – she doesn’t “need them.” And as far as I know, these are the first local DC area artists picked up by Littleton in the many years that her gallery has been in business and their subsequent national success represent an interesting example of what happens when a recognized power gallery in a particular field brings some attention to an emerging or mid career artist.
Littleton’s lineage, hard work and knowledge have made her one of the top fine art glass galleries in the world, and when Maurine Littleton speaks, the glass world listens. When she adds a new artist to her gallery’s stables, other gallerists also listen, and the example has been in the spectacular success of these artists since Littleton started paying attention to them.
In the early 2000s you could have picked up an original Tim Tate sculpture for $300 or so. Recently two of his pieces auctioned off for $41,000 each.
Art history has a curious way of rearranging what contemporary art critics and even artists tend to think is important and new in the context of art as both part of our daily social interactions and the greater multi-faceted tapestry of an “art scene.”
In the first few decades of the last century, contemporary art history credits Alfred Stieglitz as the major force who brought photography to the accepted realms of “fine art” instead of just a novel technological new way to create posed portraits, landscape images and a quick way to record an image in order to later paint from it.
Today, photography is not only accepted as a form of “high art,” but it is also one of its leading forces.
It is interesting then that the first decade of the 21st century seems to be witnessing the same phenomenon with another genre of the arts: glass.
The mere mention of glass to the most open-minded of art critics, curators and artists often brings to mind vessels, bowls and the beautiful large organic works that started to emerge from the Pacific Northwest a few decades ago, kindled by the technologic revolution introduced by Harvey Littleton (Maurine’s father) in the early 60s at the University of Wisconsin.
And it also seems to bring an immediate segregation of the glass genre to the crafts side of the artistic dialogue.
And yet, with the work that we’re seeing out of Tate, Janis, Marquart and others, we’re in the middle of a new Stieglitzian event, where brave fine artists all around the world are exploring glass as just another substrate to create contemporary art.
They are led in our region, and often the nation by the brilliant minds of the Washington Glass School artists as glass is being dragged away from the crafts world and into the rarified upper atmosphere of the “high art” world.
In fact, as I've said before, these artists and others are the Stieglitzes of the glass genre. They are forcing all of us to look at glass, and its marriage to video, metal, concrete, found objects and final delivery in all sort of forms and presence that run away from the vessel and bowl and astound the viewer with technological interaction, narrative presence and all manners and forms of new contributions (such as green art) to the contemporary art dialogue.
Glass is indeed evolving, and this important exhibition is another footprint in the important march away from unwarranted segregation as just craft and towards full integration and acceptance as just art.
The exhibition runs through October 18.
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