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101


Valley Views

Around the turn of the century he did a small series of large paintings on canvas that derived from the Sacramento Valley and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta landscape in which he lived most of his life. “Delta” is in a drab building on the UC Davis campus. Vertical shapes and lines suggest rampant growth, against a distant and high horizon, echoing his earliest work.


Delta, 1997 University of California, Davis.


Untitled,

102


He told a writer that he wandered the Delta country as a child and that, "Contra Costa County is my county. Its delta is no stranger to those who have boats and time."
Another time, he said, "I was waylaid by the beauty of the landscape, but in my work I always tried to narrow it down and present it without much sentimental clutter."
Reich generally worked in series, but he approached serial work not as a problem to be solved, but as an idea to be pursued until exhausted. They were enthusiasms, sometimes brief, sometimes more extensive. The renderings and all that led up to them -- the collages, which he had embraced very early, and the cut drawings -- constituted his most sustained series.
But after that period, because of the hand problem, his change of lifestyle, and his eternal restlessness, he focused on other variations of other themes.
The expressionistic work he did while teaching at the prison and undergoing dislocations in his personal life was a major series after the renderings.

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