My Friends: The Naked and The Drunk

The Portraits of Sienna Reid

 

by Alison Gates

August 1998

 

All in all, I found this show, dare I say? Fun.

The last time Sienna Reid showed at Collusion Gallery, in August 1997 for her show "My Friends, Naked," I approached the show with fear. The fear turned to respect when I realized that Reid had pulled off a feat of postmodernist dexterity by using one of the oldest painting formats, the nude portrait, to convey a new late-twentieth century kind of honesty and honor. Still, despite the fact that "My Friends, Naked" made me think the best kind of High Art Thoughts, I felt cold anxiety again when I heard the theme of her current show: "My Friends, Drunk."

Haunted by the pre-conceived notion that drunkenness is an undignified state, and bothered by the unappetizing images which popped up instantly whenever anyone mentioned Sienna's new project, I trudged down to Pioneer Square to meet her at the gallery on a late-June late afternoon. There propped up against the walls were no less then 36 images of intensely real people waiting to be hung. All of them looked familiar to me, and no image bore the least bit of resemblance to the homeless drunks I'd passed on the way sleeping off the effects of alcohol in Occidental Park. Taking my cue from Reid, I will dispense with arty pretension and tell you outright, "My Friends Drunk" is like a really great party where the keg has been tapped for at least an hour, the blender is whirring with another batch of margaritas and someone has just uncorked the next bottle of Chianti. Got any chips and dip? I think there's a tray of ice cubes in the freezer.

The expressions on the painter's subjects are so uniquely the property of the genteel inebriated that a million and one previously overheard conversations seemed to fill the room. Though the only animate people in the room were myself, Reid, and one of the three brothers who run Collusion, we seemed to speak amidst the chatter of a really good party, maybe a very crowded bar... or perhaps a well-attended wedding reception. You see, we stood between pictures of what are perhaps an endangered species, the Social Drinkers. These are pictures of people who really get to talking when they drink: women who dress to drink with one another, and men who naturally lean into their companions when unfettered by the self-consciousness of sobriety. The effect of the show is heightened by the fact that most of the portraits are about the size of your head and shoulders; looking into these paintings is like having a conversation with another person.

When I arrived at the opening a few days after my meeting with Reid and found the paintings hung at eye-level, the atmospheric mix of real people and art gave the gallery a sort of high-brow fun-house feel, further accentuated by Reid's husband, Yves Jaques, playing a Hammond organ next to a keg of beer.

I asked Reid what she was trying to do here, anyway. She told me that she wanted to convey movement in her paintings, and showed me the ones she felt were most successful, which were the two largest as well as the first and the last of the series, chronologically speaking. Each has a group of several characters placed in connection with each other. The light quality seems a little strange, but familiar: The overhead light of a kitchen, maybe, or the yellow glow of sun on a deck on a summer evening. She told me that the images were rendered from photographs taken at her last opening and other parties she and her husband had hosted over the years. The paintings were made up of several photographs, in the case of the group sittings, or were isolated images from single photographs. The flash-bulb wash-out lent an eerie palette in some cases, reminding me of the green-faced woman in Toulouse-Lautrec 1892 painting "At the Moulin Rouge," owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.

So it was no surprise when Reid herself mentioned Toulouse-Lautrec. Suddenly I realize she's done her strange Art History Alchemy again. I mean, drunk people are an old subject...didn't Franz Hals do a bunch of drunks, after all? Paintings of drunks are probably as old an artform as the self-portrait, given the common social strata of artists throughout Western Society. Just as she had done with the nudes of her friends, Reid has come out with the bold admission that her subject was exactly what it was: her friends, just doing whatever they were doing.

The biggest difference between "My Friends, Naked" and "My Friends, Drunk" is a manifestation of Reid's change in technique. All of the pictures in the Naked show were painted from life, with the model sitting in the room with her as she worked. While all but two of the portraits (and a self-portrait) in the Drunk show are from her stack of party photographs. She told me she'd never worked from photographs before and we both found the results startling. The work she painted with her models sitting in front of her is strangely stiff in comparison to this newer work and I don't think it has to do with any kind of quantum leap in Reid's already impressive painterly development. When I first saw the nudes, they struck me as very relaxed for paintings of nudes; I remember feeling that the models were comfortable in the presence of Their Friend, Painting. Nonetheless, these models (and many were the models for the nude portraits as well as the drunk ones) seemed pronouncedly more comfy in the presence of Their Friend, Shooting.

Years from now, this will be seen perhaps as a social-historical marker showing how we live in this Age of the Ubiquitous Camera. Most American children born after W.W.II are photographed incessantly from birth, and photographs mark every major occasion of our lives. Certainly sitting for a portrait in oils is something rare in these times--to have someone draw your caricature at the fair is even very novel. But living in the age of the disposable camera, cam-corder and digital imagery for CD-ROM as we do, no one is exactly surprised to find a camera shoved up their nose at a party. Each of us has one feature we feel does not photograph so well, and for a second after the picture is snapped we might think, "Gee I hope my eyes were open." But all in all this is a piece of equipment that, especially after a drink or two, is not scary or intimidating in the least, and we look at photographs a thousand times a day, on television, in advertising and in the course of maintaining our daily relationships to other people.

As for the painter, one wonders if she, too, felt somewhat freer in the process. We all know a photograph can catch us unflatteringly, but it's an image created with a piece of sometimes unpredictable equipment. No one's to blame, really, if the photographer is an amateur and the picture is not entirely beautiful. The commonly accepted fact of which leaves an artist like Sienna Reid the freedom to paint the image the camera captured, without the responsibility of perhaps having to justify why a crooked nose can't be straightened out just a little bit. But Reid did not tell me this herself. She was primarily concerned with movement. She wanted to capture a bit of the ambiance of a Fellini film, some of the flesh of a Bacon painting, and last but not least, the impromptu quality of those casually snapped photographs.

For her first try at painting from a photograph she selected her images very well. There are perhaps more direct outward-gaze postures among the smaller works in which only one head of a person is featured. The members in groups interact but not necessarily by looking at one another, ala Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass." This prompted me to wonder: At a party, do most people look at the person whom addresses us, or does one spend more time looking at the other people in the room? Do you watch the door or monitor the bottom of your glass? Closer proximity of bodies drinking booze seems to negate the importance of prolonged eye-contact, and our body language becomes more ambiguous.

For the first time Reid had also set about capturing clothes and had included such props as glasses and bottles in her paintings of the human figure. We talked about painting fabric, it being the only thing I personally ever enjoyed trying to paint. She surprised herself by becoming so engaged in rendering cloth on the human form when for her whole career she'd been so very fascinated by painting flesh. The use of glasses was partly due to a challenge put to her by her studio-mate, a painter of still-life. They certainly were not required as any kind of device for conveying the narrative of beverage consumption, since in fact the smaller one-or-two head images indicate the drink as much as the larger paintings. The larger paintings carry more information about time and place, but remain equally intimate, which brought to my mind a quote from The Great Gatsby: "I like large parties, they're so much more intimate." Although the idea predates the instant camera, a large party is very intimate indeed when, due to a crush of bodies in the living room, one cannot stand far enough away to capture more than two people on a sofa.

After our gallery conversation, Reid let me walk around and look at the work alone for a bit and I was able to identify a couple of other artists we know mutually, Jenny Hacker and Wendy Hanson, as well as Reid's husband, and herself. I pondered how many drinks I had had with these people over the course of the past fifteen years, and the circumstances under which I ever came to know them in the first place. Suddenly I thought to myself: "Well...I 'd guess we met at some party." I turned to Sienna after pondering art and the ideas of drinking as a social pursuit and realized that the last question I had for her was: "Are we going for a beer now?" And of course, she answered enthusiastically "Yes."

 

Click on the green arrow below to begin the virtual gallery walk of scanned slides of Sienna Reid's paintings from her shows

"My Friends, Naked," (12 images)

"My Friends, Drunk," (43 images)

"Tempesta," (20 images)

"Corset Book," (18 images)

"Corpus," (12 images)

"Corsets," (5 images)

"Parnassus" (12 images)

 

Sienna Reid can be reached at: sienna@tiscalinet.it 

Alison Gates can be reached at: aligates@hotmail.com