When you see a Jackie Reeves painting you know it. She has been honing her unique style over two decades, gaining mastery and confidence. You can partake in a selection of Reeve’s art, “Larger Than Life – Drawings In Time,” curated by fellow artist Bert Yarborough in a solo exhibition of 14 large scale pieces at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM).
The pieces are physically dynamic and provocative intellectually and emotionally. Reeves uses her own body as a portal through which her life experiences shunt onto her canvases. She’ll place her receiving material on the floor, whether a birch wood panel, mylar, fabric or canvas. On all fours dripping, splashing, spreading, dragging paint, she begins a kind of dance with the media she uses.
Several of the works at PAAM are done on black out curtain linerswhich Reeves received as a gift. She played with it, not knowing its qualities, she twisted, painted, added water, folded and discovered textures to it which reminded her of ancient maps, finding it had a way of absorbing paint which made its surface like sueded skin. It was an experiment circling back to “Self Portrait with Oven Mitt and Loaded Brush,” executed years before on curtain blinds.
These experiments inspire her, and their “happy accidents” lead her on a process of discovery with each work and its attendant evolutions, from what she calls a Rorschach, to emerging images — whether abstract, figural or a combination of both — and the images completion with such as acrylic, and wax, or collage.