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49


Driving through Sausalito, we passed the Benny Bufano, and someone said, “It’s a rock that looks like a seal,” and someone else said, “No it’s a seal that looks like a rock.” And I said, “No, it’s a seal that looks like a rock that looks like a seal that looks like a rock.”

Technique

These confrontational images were rendered with techniques Reich developed, and the method was essential to the message.
His approach related to or mimicked the layering of ink tints in color printing. He used colored pencils whose thin layers were semi-transparent, so that color and light from below merged and mixed with the layers above.
Each layer had to be laboriously rubbed into the paper or the pencil layer below to induce this translucency. Reich used an amber-tipped stylus to meld the layers. He called it burnishing.
The process took long hours of steady, repetitive, exhausting work, but Reich created a surprising number of his “renderings” in just a few years.
At the end, his hand, wrist, eyes and interest ran out, and he moved on.

50


A text panel for the Crocker show read, in part:
“This exhibition examines a key period in the career of Sacramento artist Don Reich -- the mid-1970s. Although works produced during this time are decidedly different from any that preceded or followed, continuities in Reich’s technique emerge when examined against the breadth of his work. Attention to detail, dream-like imagery and masterly use of color and line are recurrent themes….
“Reich’s work skillfully reproduces the look of collaged paper scraps so accurately that cut edge and drawn line become indistinguishable. The source of this imagery could be found in a photograph of a model or a chicken pot pie ad. He determined that images from printed publications could be humorously compromised by unexpected juxtapositions. This eclectic and commercial selection of images resonated with the California Funk Art of the 1970s….
“In works executed since the 1970s, which rely on less taxing techniques, he veers far from the excruciating focus of the drawings in this exhibition, but continues to pay close attention to the drawn line and the play of images…”

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