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7


Line, eye and mind were one. Each pencil line or brushstroke was a clear and direct statement of his life. Never sentimental.
I am not going to get into Don Reich’s personal life here except where it affected his art. He had hard times, but in the main he seemed impervious to setbacks. He was determined to be himself, a painter.
For much of his life, he was enormously productive.

1950s --1960s

He was doing determinedly abstract painting when we met. In some paintings of the 1960s he was at times clearly abstracting landscape, but shapes were complex, mostly flat. He was trying to avoid the distraction of objective imagery, and when a visitor to the gallery told him she saw a parakeet in a painting, he was enraged. He couldn’t not see the parakeet and immediately reworked the painting. Don was not a parakeet person.
In conversation and art, he never uttered a cliché. Nor lived one.

8



Untitled, 1967. Collection of Stephen Mir.


Coast, 1962. Collection of Stephen Mir.

These were mostly high-horizon landscape paintings, but also drawings and collages. Some with minimalist birds. Earlier, he had done landscapes of the Sierra foot hills near Colfax, California, where he lived as a teenager.

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