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17


This tipping of space can be seen often in Reich’s work, but it became less frequent, less confrontational. Imagery continued to be essential, but color was always ready to be unleashed, not just in green, but red as well. A lot of red. He liked to quote Gauguin’s alleged last words, “Show me some red.”
Many of these high-horizon paintings were smallish, with dusky palette. Rough brushstrokes, but occasional glimpses of what became a distinctive aspect of his work -- line. That characteristic, firm, definite, decisive line, inflected with great spirit.
He wrote, “I want to cut my canvases up and float the pieces on a much larger canvas, like shifting world plates once fitting elsewhere. The doing of it in an attitude of murderous red, utterly dripping in a relentless warmth.”
Cutting and displacing became key strategies.
He worked in every medium he came across -- oils, acrylics, pastels, watercolor, house paint and all drawing media. He used creosote and taught himself encaustic. He studied materials with the object of making pictures that would last indefinitely, like the old masters’.

18


But he’d use children’s glitter glue from Walgreen’s if that was all that was available. And he would work anywhere -- the back seat of a car was his studio if need be.
He lost his wallet in Carmel and only had enough money in his pocket to buy a child’s watercolor set and a few sheets of cheap paper. In minutes he did some paintings of boats, waves and birds, sold them to a gallery and got bus fare home. He wasn’t proud of the pictures and refused the gallery owner’s repeated pleas for more.

Spans

He tended to work in series. Some grouped around a theme, some around an experience.
An example:
He saw some railroad bridges from a car, somewhere in Nevada, I think, and over a period of years did a series of oils in which the angular beams of those bridges appeared in altered, abstracted, flattened forms. These were not at all realistic images -- I and others called them bridge paintings because that is where they came from, but they were totally abstract paintings, and he used the slightly more abstract word, “span.”
Moody, some of them.

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