From the Series Surface Tension, 2001 Laurie Reid is a young artist (born in 1964) who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has recently received attention from the wider art world by being included in two exhibitions in New York: the Whitney Biennial in 2000, and a group show at The Drawing Center in 1995. In 1999, she received an award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) group that included a cash grant and participation in an exhibition at the Museum. In all these venues she showed large (5 to 16 feet-long) watercolors with very little watercolor on them.
Tender Tangle, 1998 Sparse, barely pigmented watery chains of marks glide across the paper, warping it as water will do, and the sheets-with titles like “Tender Tangle” or “Linger in the Moonlight”-hang freely, without frames, from pins in the wall. In her prints, Reid doesn’t try to imitate her watercolors. She is very interested in materials, and she understands that prints have a particular nature.
“It was immediately clear that I wasn’t drawing on paper,” she said, speaking about printmaking. “This was a copper plate. And I was drawing with acid that was biting into it. I liked the seriousness and weight of it all. The watercolors have vulnerability, yet they want to be imposing. The big size helps them do that. But printmaking is imposing in itself. The plate mark is stable and fixed. I could see I should work with that.”
Meridian, 2000 Reid grew up (one of five kids) in a university town, Eugene, Oregon, and her father is an artist. At home, art materials were part of the environment. “As a child, I was absolutely absorbed by materials,” she remembered. “I loved the sensation of materials.”
In deciding on a career, however, she did not at first choose art. She got a degree in French literature, and after a time spent in Paris began teaching French language in New York and, later, San Francisco. Eventually, she enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts. “I had always loved words, but at some point I realized that what I really loved about writing was the act of writing,” she explained. “The feel of the paper under the hand, the tool in the hand, the smell of materials.” Her art, she says, is “more about a desire to communicate than communicating something in particular.”
From the Series Softest Wall, 2001 If you look at a page of writing in a language you don’t understand, she points out, “you get a sense of the page, and the spirit of the writer, the sense of devotion. You don’t always need to understand the precise meaning of the text.” Reid has spoken of printmaking as an intimate medium, and her prints, some of which use luster inks that change according to the angle at which you view them, are quiet but strongly present.
When asked if her work is a reaction to our culture, a withdrawal from the bombardment that is constantly upon us, she replied in this way: “Sure it is. It creates a space for another kind of activity.”