Pen Reid intends to present unsettling moments, sometimes funny, complex in the ideas they explore. Given her facility with tonality and colour and love of pattern, they are often beautiful too.
The world of these pictures is the domestic, often grounded in very specific details: the claw-footed bath, a flowerbed bursting into a hospital waiting room. The viewer might be peeking past a curtain into this world or, along with the occupants, looking out. These complex compositions fold through indoor and outdoor space. The paintings do this metaphorically, too, inviting us to glimpse inner worlds, private hopes, fears, fantasies.
Not all have people in them; sometimes their presence is oblique, shown in a photograph or glimpsed in a mirror. Animals might appear as their representatives, like the two budgerigars in ‘A Long Marriage’, but also sometimes as themselves such as otters swimming in a flooded bathroom.
What indoors and outdoors mean in a Pen Reid painting is not straightforward. The domestic is a place of nurture and growth, but outside is the realm of the imagination, wildness and freedom. There is a whiff of fairy tale in paintings such as ‘Five Lost Children’, in which the five small protagonists explore a big empty house in a forest.
In a painting like ‘Fresh Air’, there is a tangible sense of menace in the way the bathroom fills up with steam.There are moments of great humanity, like the head scarfed woman in ‘Wrong Footwear’ who finds herself ill-equipped for an Alpine landscape. And there’s a deep sadness (as well as a little absurdity) in ‘Empty Nest’, with its room crowded with tiny beds.
Layers of oil or ink are laid down with a bravura blend of tenderness and confidence. There are controlled accidents of transparency and texture, using varnish and thinners. Working with oil paints or ink on linen or board, she builds up surface only to break them down, with a painting often made up of half revealed layers. Mixed media works in gouache and pencil show off her drawing skills, and her feeling for paint is on show everywhere, in colours and patterns, light and shadow. She likes to work on the covers of old books, making their titles part of the story. These works are the product of a quiet but original voice, probing the boundaries of interior and exterior, real life and imagination, wildness and confinement, and how they can sometimes be more porous than we think.
