Initial Impulse: Black Square
Artist
Jennifer Wynne Reeves
(American, 1963–2014)
Date1999
Mediumacrylic, oil stick on birch panel
Dimensionspanel: 119.4 x 223.5 cm (47 x 88 in.)
ClassificationsPaintings
Credit LineCharlotte E.W. Buffington Fund
Object number2000.56
Label TextJennifer Reeves’ paintings regularly confound our expectations of the roles of representational elements and abstract gestures or, in her words, what is typically understood as “real” and “fake.” In Initial Impulse: Black Square a personal vocabulary influenced by the Michigan environment of her childhood includes realistic landscape elements—a big sky and grassy plain—places we recognize from the physical world. Reeves’ lexicon of abstract forms—pools of swirling paint, snarls of coiled pigment, stalks of color blocks, ribbons of squeezed color—refers to our knowledge of paint as it exists in the world of art. Equally believable although unnamable and occurring in somewhat precarious places, these exaggerated and highly physical forms (created with palette knives, trowels, and cake decorating tools in addition to brushes) make absolute sense in this fictional world. Reeves described a revelation: “One day the trees looked fake to me, like the tricks of the brush. A painting of a tree looked more real.”
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