Writing About Erik ReeL

Catalogs and Monographs

Kinoshita, Alexis and Moen, Grace, Erik ReeL 20 20, FAFA, 2020

Erik ReeL: Full Circle. Exhibition catalog, Morris Graves Museum of Art, 2016

Carlsson, Jae. Tabula Rasa. Exhibition catalog, 2013

Erik ReeL: From the Private Collection. Catalog. Centaur: 2013

Arconi, Nikki. Erik ReeL Painting Catalog: 1250 -1456. Centaur: 2011

Erik ReeL: Painting: Catalog 1352 – 1401. Centaur: 2010

Erik ReeL: Works on Paper. Centaur: 2009

Erik ReeL: Paintings. Centaur: 2009

Chaos. Exhibition catalog, 2009

Quantum Dynamics of Painting. exhibition catalog, 2008

Erik ReeL: paintings and drawings. 110 plates, Centaur: 2008

Erik ReeL. Face to Face. New World: 2008

17th Annual McNeese National Works on Paper. Exhibition catalog, 2004

17th Parkside National Small Print Exhibition. Exhibition catalog. Wisconsin: 2004

Interviews

Joseph Gallivan, Axios, Art Snacks: Erik ReeL's "Street," February 2024

Ruins of Runes, Erik ReeL text of Sean Riehl video, May 2014

Interview with Erik ReeL, june 2013 Society805.com

Interview with Erik ReeL, January 2013 KAQB

Video

The Visual Language of Erik ReeL, Sean Riehl, 2014, documentary

Epiphany: Erik ReeL and Diane Silver, Eric Minh Swenson, 2017

Objects of Impossibility, Nathan Vonk, 2017, KGTV

Sources

Nathan Vonk, Exciting Work at Museum of Contemporary Art, February 2015

Ruins of Runes, Erik ReeL text of Sean Riehl video, May 2014,

Nelson Jesson, Semiotic Abstraction, November 2013

Christian Reed, Oh, Those Pesky Tag Memes, February 2013

Ben Chinay, Signs of a Lost Civilization, December 2011

Nikki Arconi, Erik ReeL: Markings, catalog essay, November 2011

Erik ReeL 2172, Tutustu kiinnostaviin ideoihin! Pansemia/Asemia sources website

Selected Press

Joseph Gallivan, Axios, Art Snacks: Erik ReeL's "Street," February 2024

Kit Boise-Cossart, Erik ReeL, GraySpace Santa Barbara, November 2018

Leslie Dinaberg, Erik ReeL: Zero Point & Rhonda P. Hill: Blurred Boundaries: Fashion as an Art, September 2018

Erik ReeL at the Butler Institute of American Art, July 2018

Leslie Westbrook, Welcome to Planet ReeL, Ventana Magazin, October 2017

Erik ReeL and Diane Silver, 13 July 2017

Nathan Vonk, Exciting Work at Museum of Contemporary Art, February 2015

Nathan Vonk Review: Out of the Great Wide Open, February 2015

ReeL Grand Slam, November 2014

Society805.com, VAM Improvisational Painting, 7 July 2014

Nash Rightmer & Erik ReeL’s Standing in Boots, May 2014

Nelson Jesson, Semiotic Abstraction, November 2013

Tracy Hudak, A Painter With a View, April 2013

Christian Reed, Oh, Those Pesky Tag Memes, February 2013

Nathan Vonk, How Soon is Now?, June 2012

Ted Mills, In the Abstract Bedroom, June 2012

Ben Chinay, Signs of a Lost Civilization, December 2011

Nicole D’Amore. Faces are Archeteypes, August 2008

Ashley Olive. Erik ReeL at FrameWorks, Otober 2008

Joseph Woodard. Joie de Vivre, 28 August 2004

Charles Donelan. The Riviera American-style, 18 September 2003

Sarah McIver, ReeL Irrational Exuberance, 12 May 2003

Anita Farina, ReeL’s Bagdad Hotel, 17 August 2003

David Jensen, Arte Tropicana and the ReeL Thing, 10 June 2003

Annette Sorel, ReeL Splash of Color, 5 May 2002

Joseph Woodard, Pools and Lines, 2 May 2002

Delores Tarzan, ReeL at Cornish Institute, Seattle Times, 15 October 1984

Regina Hackett, Seattle P-I, 21 January 1981

Barbara Earl Thomas, ReeL Splash of Color, Highline Times, 10 June 1977

Related Articles

Kaya Noteboom, Erik ReeL: The Art of Kenosis, PNCA paper,  October 2023

Jae Carlsson, Erik ReeL, Tabula Rasa catalog, April 2013

Raphael Rubinstein, Provisional Painting Part 2: To Rest Lightly on Earth, February 2012

Nikki Arconi, Erik ReeL: Markings, catalog essay, November 2011

Raphael Rubinstein, Provisional Painting, May 2009

Selected Writing by Erik ReeL

Books

Pterodactyl Cries: Art, Abstraction, Apocalypse, 2021

On Visual Art

Pterodactyl Cries: Art, Abstraction, Apocalypse, 2021

Matisse in Long Beach, August 2018

Mark Bradford at Hauser & Wirth, May 2018

Yumiko Glover: Pushing the Button 2058 Times, May 2018

Chagall: Fantasies on Stage at LACMA, 13 November 2017

Jimmie Durham: Art at the Center of the World, 11 April 2017

Jean Dubuffet Drawings at the Hammer, 10 April 2017

Moholy-Nagy at LACMA, 31 March 2017

Henry Taylor at Blum & Poe, December 2016

Agnes Martin at LACMA, 21 June 2016

Mara De Luca at Luis de Jesus, 7 June 2016

Letter From the Front, Face to Face, catalog, August 2008

Michael Spafford at the Seattle Art Museum, Vanguard, v. 11, no, 4, May 1982, pp. 34-35

On Theater

Bakersfield Mist, 14 may 2018

Sgt. Pepper at 50; Mark Morris at Eternity, 14 may 2018

Shepard's True West at SPTC

Baby Tangle, 14 may 2018

American Buffalo, 20 april 2018

Macbeth in Ojai, 20 april 2018

Lear, 27 mar 2018

Wrongs of the Righteous, 12 feb 2018

This Random World, 12 feb 2018

Perlmutter’s Directing Hamlet, 12 nov 2017

Taking Sides, 13 nov 2017

Flying H Does Blackbird, 16 oct 2017

Dance: Anaїs by Mixed eMotion Theatrix, 25 sept 2017

Incognito, 22 sept 2017

Becky’s New Car, 6 sept 2017

Steel Magnolias at the Elite, 4 sept 2017

McPherson’s Birds, 1 july 2017

When We Were Young and Unafraid, 9 jun 2017

Milo’s Other Mozart, 5 jun 2017

Beached, 26 april 2017

To Woo is to Win, 25 april 2017

Agnes of God, 6 mar 2017

Devil’s Music that Feeds the Soul, 3 mar 2017

Driving Home: Rubicon Concludes Nibroc Trilogy, 7 feb 2017

Jason Furlani’s Family Trees, 6 dec 2016

Chapter Two at ETC, 5 dec 2016

Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, 17 oct 2016

Night Alive, 24 sept 2016

This Isn’t Kansas, Yet, Is It?, 23 july 2016

Open Meeting Closed, 15 july 2016

Oh, How Lovely Do Angels Fall, 15 jJune 2016

What Kind of Sticks?, 10 june 2016

The Pillowman, 19 may 2016

David Hare’s Skylight, 18 may 2016

Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles at SPTC, 23 april 2016

Uncanny Valley, 24 mar 2016

Taking Liberty, 7 mar 2016

That Other Place, 16 feb 2016

See Rock City, 2 feb 2016

FUBAR at Flying H, 25 jan 2016

Copenhagen, 16 sept 2015

Acting Rules at Flying H and Elite: Small Engine Repair and Zero Hour, 19 oct 2015

Into the Jaws of History, 13 Sep 2015

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad ... Living Room, 5 Sep 2015

Twisted Trouble, 18 jul 2015

Other Desert Cities, 3 jun 2015

Roger That, 31 may 2015

Regional Art News

Joe Cardella 1945-2018, may 2018

Vonder Gray at WAV, 9 feb 2018

The Art Market 2017, 12 jan 2018

Bob Privett at the Ventura County Museum, 6 june 2017

Assembling Assemblage, 17 may 2017

Museum Mishandles Asian Pacific Exhibition, 27 jun 2016

A World Down the Street, 24 may 2016

Flying H Theatre Announces New Plays, 15 feb 2016

New Executive Director for the Museum of Ventura County, 18 april 2013

Pistol Productions: Firing Away, 1 oct 2012

Is the 805 Ready for a Regional Arts Council?, 9 feb 2012

Putting It All Together: Tracy Hudak, 3 feb 2012

Arts Candidates Sweep Ventura City Council Elections, 18 nov 2011

Irving Foundation Grants for the 805, 28 oct 2011

Ventura Wins National Arts Destination Award, 25 jul 2011

Other Publications

In the late 1970s and early 1980s ReeL wrote on art and performance for a variety of publications including Vanguard, ArtExpress, High Performance art magazines, Artweek, and/or Notes, weekly reviews and a weekly column on the arts for the daily newspaper in east Seattle, the Bellevue Journal-American, was arts editor and writer for the Seattle Voice monthly glossy city magazine, and collaborated with art critic Jae Carlsson [ArtDish, ArtForum, ArtsWatch] on a number of zines on language and critical theory in the pre-internet era. He is currently an occasional contributor to Oregon ArtsWatch and various international platforms.

"ReeL's technique exhibits a high degree of transparency, layering, sfgraffito and graffitto, with a strong sense of hand, the hand-made, and an absence of any references to the material world. This work can be seen as a thorough-going critique of materialism, the machine or machine-made, and the triumph of feeling over the manufactured. For ReeL, marking is a defining characteristic of the human and the primordial act of signification and meaning for human consciousness." – Nikki Arconi, 2010

ReeL contends that with the rise of graphically interfaced computers and the ever-increasing involvement of more and more humans with screens in their daily lives, the cognitive processing of two dimensional surfaces is central to civilized human experience and thus a focus of his visual art. Further, central to ReeL's work is an exploration of human marking on a surface, since for ReeL, “marking is a defining characteristic of the human and the primordial act of signification and meaning for human consciousness.”

Born in Seattle in 1952, Erik ReeL attended Whitman College majoring in mathematics, the University of California, at Berkeley, and the University of Washington majoring in art history and studio art, graduating summa cum laude in 1975. ReeL studied art history with Rainer Crone, painting with Jacob Lawrence, Michael Spafford, Bob Jones, and Michael Dailey, color with Richard Dahn [a student of Albers at Yale], sumi-e with George Tsutakawa, and, independently, Chinese brush with Hsai Chen.

In the late 1970s Reel wrote for Vanguard, ArtExpress, and High Performance art magazines, Artweek, and/or Notes, did weekly reviews and a column for the Bellevue Journal-America daily newspaper, and was the arts editor for the Seattle Voice city magazine. During this time he sat on two Seattle Arts Commission Special Task Forces: Media and Educational Institutions for the Arts. Reel was involved in performance art as well as writing and painting, performing in pieces at the Seattle Art Museum, Cornish School for Allied Arts, Washington Hall, Poetry Seattle, Salon Apocalypse, and several art galleries, usually collaborating with musicians and dancers, while exhibiting regularly with the original Jackson Street Gallery located upstairs at 123 Jackson Street. ReeL taught art history, color theory, and life drawing for five years at what is now Seattle Central College.

Leaving Seattle in 1984, ReeL essentially dropped out of society for a decade, for the most part not exhibiting or publishing during this time with the notable exception of a solo show of drawing at Seattle's Mazey Hickey Gallery in 1987.

ReeL’s painting has alternated between phases of figurative and abstract imagery, for the most part ignoring the distinction between drawing and painting. In 2009 ReeL stripped all references to the material world from his work as a critique of the hyper-materialism he felt pervades contemporary society. In a presentation at the Morris Graves Museum of Art, Portland-based art critic, Jae Carlsson [Art Dish, ArtForum] pointed out ReeL’s visual and philosophical connections to earlier Pacific Northwest painters Morris Graves and Mark Tobey, while at the same time indicating that ReeL had pushed his work beyond any Post-Modernist regime.

In 2017, the following statement was published by a California gallery regarding ReeL’s work:

"Like an archaeologist uncovering the remnants of written language ReeL creates meaning from, not just what is visible, but in what has been obscured. To understand ReeL’s work one must look at his attraction to such seemingly incongruent influences as erased whiteboards, blizzards, improvisational music, and abandoned industrial sites. His work celebrates the meaning in remnants, the hidden, the random and destroyed."

In 2019 ReeL returned to the Pacific Northwest, relocating to Portland, Oregon, where he currently maintains his studio and lives with his wife, Rhonda P. Hill. 

Here ReeL initiated a series of related exhibitions reintroducing his work to the Pacific Northwest: an exhibition at PLACE in Portland in 2023 showing transitional work done since the COVID pandemic; a survey of work done in the decade prior to arriving in Portland of pre-Pandemic work at the Laura Vincent Gallery in Portland in 2024, and an exhibition at Whitman College in Washington showing current work in the Spring semester of 2025.

ReeL's art is collected on five continents and represented in private collections based in Buenos Aires, Berlin, Chicago, Dubai, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Houston, Indianapolis, London, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, Oakland, Paris, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Santa Fe [NM], Seattle, and Seoul. Public collections include the permanent collections of the Morris Graves Museum of Art, Seattle City Light, City of Seattle, Czong Institute of Contemporary Art, Museum of Ventura County, and Whitman College.

My work has followed a life-long pattern of exploring aspects of how human consciousness processes visual stimuli, or what is often called cognitive processing, especially when involving two-dimensional information. Early on, this was based on a study of color theory, visual ambiguities, and the visual constancies involved in how the human brain processes information on a two-dimensional surface. It is my contention that with the rise of graphically interfaced personal computers and the ever-increasing involvement of more and more humans with flat screens in their daily lives, that an understanding and deeper awareness of how two-dimensional cognitive processing operates and works is central to civilized human experience and should be a focus of my visual art. Further, my work is intimately bound up with an exploration of human marking on a surface, without machine or mechanical assistance; I feel such marking is a defining characteristic of the human and the primordial act of signification and meaning for human consciousness.

My work has been influenced by micro- and nano-photography, poorly erased whiteboards, sidewalks, ruins, abandoned industrial sites, ancient stone surfaces, fire, sand, sea and ice, charcoal, hieroglyphs, esoteric texts, Hubble Ultra-Deep Field photographs, foundries, wars, concrete, pubic hair, cytoplasm, craters, wood, photographs of things we cannot see with the naked eye in real time, paintings, railroad box-car markings, Skandinavian runes, blizzards, scratched surfaces, improvisational music, typography, the human voice, the night sky, the inside of an eyeball, the surface of other planets, scars, deserts, scorched earth, and the accidental, which is not really indeterminate, but the result of subtler action on a deeper plane of consciousness.

I have been particularly inspired by improvisational music: Vijay Ayer, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Theolonus Monk, Dewey Redman, Flamenco, Jamaican Freestyle, Imrat Khan and the improvisational traditions of the Indian subcontinent.

As for early influences, growing up in Seattle my visual starting point for painting was Mark Tobey’s White Writing paintings. Other influences included Pacific Northwest Scandinavian textile, architectural, and design traditions, which tend to be highly abstract. Later, it was Klee and Miro: In terms of color theory there is a direct lineage from Itten and Klee to Albers to Dahn to myself. At university, influences also came from Michael Spafford and the Black Mountain school via Jacob Lawrence and Robert Jones, then slightly later, Cy Twombly via his exhibitions in the 1970s.

I have found my researches into human mark making capable of sensitizing people to the subtleties of their own internal cognitive processing in ways that are not easy to verbalize, but are clearly perceived by those who look sufficiently long enough to fully experience the paintings directly. This is a process bound by specific cognitive constraints that take a certain amount of time. A glance is insufficient.

Erik ReeL

Photo credits:

photo 1: Erik ReeL in his studio with collector, sociologist, documentary filmmaker, and feminist scholar, France Winddance Twine, 2018. Photo: Rhonda P. Hill.

photo 2: Independent curator Kathy Rae Huffman and Erik ReeL, Villa Aurora Library, Santa Monica, California, 2014, photo: Rhonda P. Hill

photo 3: Erik ReeL at Front Street Studio, Ventura, California Studio, 2016, photo: Skye Bennike

photo 4: Laurie Kirby and Boom Duo [John Lacques and Noah Thomas] at ReeL's Front Street Studio, 2015, photo: Rhonda P. Hill

photo 5: Erik ReeL, Portland, Oregon, 2020, photo: Erik ReeL. 

This photo is a public commons photo, available to use without permission in conjunction with any publication regarding Erik ReeL or his art, consistent with fair use under USA copyright law.