Oliver Reed

Oliver Reed came to college to give us a talk about his work. I have to say from a presentation point of view, his talk was a bit quiet in a dark room. it was a bit hard to feel his enthusiasm  about art from his talk. But afterwards, I went on his website and saw so much work on there. I looked through, his work is all about landscape, but they are in different styles. From as early as 1993's abstract work till present's representational work. There are paintings, drawings, photographs, videos and sculptures There are certainly strong enthusiasm in his work. He did not keep in one style. We can see from his work he keeps changing styles, looking for new things, trying different possibilities. He has been an art practitioner for over 20 years. If there is no strong belief and genuine love in art, this would not continue. And this is where it hit me. I watched a short video about how he apply paint. It was very interesting. Although his work are not so much my style, I like the way he keeps his art his way.

There are a few things he talked about I feel are very useful for my current learning.

• A nice and quick work comes from long time practice and lots of experiments
• get the idea out of your head in a quick way by using photographs, photocopies, cut and paste, collage etc
• using photographs to look for interesting elements and work out compositions

Here are a few his drawing I like. Feel that they can be made into tiles.