In a dimly lit room Wednesday evening, audience members listened as artist, sculptor and gallery proprietor Rob Reynolds '90 reflected on his progression from his days at Brown to his life now. The artist offered advice not only about how to push through frustration with success in the field of art, but also on how to live.
Throughout his talk, Reynolds adopted a comical and expressive presentation, calling the audience "gang" and using colloquial speech, making the event more of a conversation than a lecture. "You have much less to lose by saying what you feel and think than you think," Reynolds said. "Your heart knows you better than your brain."
Using two adjacent projection screens - on the left from the out- dated slide carousel, on the right a PowerPoint - Reynolds placed his progression in the context of the progression of technology. On the left, he flipped through images of his early works. On the right, the PowerPoint streaming from his MacBook computer announced the title of each stage in his development as an artist.
Reynolds grew up outside of Boston before attending Cornell and transferring to Brown. An experience in which he nearly drowned in Maine one summer defined what his work has
Become focused on today. But the path to get to this fascination with nautical themes was as equally informative in his process of development and source of inspiration as his near-death experience was, he said. It was a synthesis of 10 years of work to find what he liked to paint and the platform where he could incorporate all the techniques he enjoyed, he said.
Throughout his lecture he showed his care for the audience and desire for other artists who shared a similar background as him to be able to profit from art. Concentrating in "Art and Symbiotics," and taking classes comparable to those offered by the modern culture and media department today, Reynolds said his undergraduate experience was influential in his search for inspiration. his teachers pushed him toward a variety of source material, and he said he thinks about his experience at Brown "every day."
Hannah Winkler '13, whose interest in painting lies in an exploration of color, said when Reynolds visited Brown last year, he critiqued one of her works, and similarly offered helpful advice about her techniques and positive encouragement. Reynolds also critiqued students' work before he gave the lecture Wednesday evening.
"I just love art so much. It's like heaven for me," Reynolds said. But he didn't always feel this way, he said.
Reynolds illustrated this through his progression as an artist. he showed pictures of various stages in painting one of his more famous works, to fur- ther relate to the budding artists and assure that - just like he had a decade of progression before he settled on a source of inspiration - the actual act of making art doesn't come easily to him either.
He named the beginning of this decade "Great expectations."
"Like young Pip, I got to learn the art world and didn't know if I liked it," he said. Reynolds' early work appeared on the left screen, displaying exclusively paintings of toilets. As he said, "We all start somewhere."
He said he became fascinated by the floret designs on the architecture throughout the city of Providence, and this became the source of inspiration for his paintings while a Brown student.
Reynolds defined his next phase as a crash. "I hated the art world - every- thing about it except art itself," he said. During this time, he developed his fascination with shadow and became a perfectionist - living what he said was "a hermetic process" in his studio. while informative in his decade of development, he warned, "At some point, you have to realize the beauty in the work, and put it out for everyone else to see. The only way out is through."
Ending his hermetic lifestyle and becoming a professor at Harvard, Reynolds developed a fascination with the rainbow stickers of the 80s, inspired by John Lennon's "Imagine" and the pacifist ideals of Quaker meetings he attended after the breakout of war post-9/11. During this time he explored the technique of mirroring.
That stage he named a "stepping stone" to his work today. About art and success, he said, "It's a long, winding road." But he stressed that winding or not, the reason he continues to love art is because his source of inspiration is one that resonates with him. It allows him to combine his interest in text, the effects of mirror and shadow and the concrete in work that displays a relationship to an event he still is haunted by in his dreams.
Now a curator as well as an artist, he said the historical setting and influences of one's life, although they may not directly inspire the work, definitely speak through it. When he curates, he said he chooses pieces from diverse sources that speak to the same theme to contextualize the status of a theme in the imagination and in the real.
