^{3:00 am (2021, acrylic, charcoal, and collage on curtain blinds, 54×115”)}

Jackie Reeves on view at PAAM

by Rebecca M. Alvin

“I just want to be open to all the possibilities and I don’t want to be the boss of my own paintings,” says Jackie Reeves, reflecting on her body of work. The turning point in how she thought about her work came at the age of 40. It’s one of those years that somehow carries a weight that translates into self-reflection and then personal transformation for many of us. But it also coincided with the death of Reeves’ sister, also an artist, who was only 45 years old.

“I was constantly evolving and changing. But at that time, it was the fact that I’d just lost my sister [to cancer] and she was so young. I just felt really like, well, what if I only have it a year? Let’s say I only have a year to live, which is like what happened to her. It just happened so quickly. I’m like, ‘What do I want to leave behind?’ So that set that kind of parameter for myself, and it really helped me prioritize what’s the most important thing to me. And it’s always come down to family and love and my connections with the people in my life,” she explains.

Up until then, Reeves had been working as a commercial artist—primarily painting custom murals for clients. She’d studied art at Concordia University in her native Montreal. Her parents were architects. And her life had revolved around an artistic path without ever actually working on her own creative vision. Her talent was used to fulfill the needs and desires of clients, not to express the voice inside of her. But, like so many, at that pivotal age, Reeves began to think about what it would be like to explore her own artistic interests without having to run them by a client—or anyone else for that matter—for approval.

Her first step was to do a show with a group of friends who were also artists, and from that point on, she says, she was hooked on this new way of thinking about her skills and talent. She enrolled in the low-residency MFA program that Massachusetts College of Art ran in collaboration with the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown at the age of 42. It was here that she met Bert Yarborough, the curator of her solo show on view now at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM). He was one of several mentors she worked closely with in the program.

“Going to grad school was like the beginning of developing my style. Like, what is my style? It took me a while to figure that out,” she says. “I’ve always been drawn to figurative work. So, in the beginning, I was doing that. In the first show that I had I was thinking about what do I need to paint? I kind of didn’t really know what to paint. Like, do I do landscapes? I live on Cape Cod, I should probably do landscapes. But I was trying to get out of that mindset of responding to what would be popular, what might sell. I’m just trying to do the opposite of what I had done. So, it took a lot of thinking inwardly about what do I want to do, what’s important to me? And that was a struggle. That’s taken me this whole lifetime to figure that out.”

But when a mentor asked her about the possibility of entirely eliminating the figure in her work, something shifted. In her Barnstable studio now, she recalls, “That really threw me. But it threw me in a good direction because it opened up the world of paint and abstraction. So, I wasn’t so much focused on the subject matter. I suddenly became really, like, curious about what the paint was doing, what the colors were, how they were, you know, abstraction, basically.”

The process became the thing, not the subject matter. And even as over time she found her way back to those same inspirations: family and the people around her, with this new understanding of painting, Reeves’ style came into focus: a figurative abstraction imbued with fluid, rounded lines and dynamic, expressive backgrounds. 

In his curatorial statement, Yarborough says Reeves is “fearless and exploratory in her mark-making and usage of collage and mixed media. Her employment of abstraction—passages, marks, color—creates mystery within the recognizable realm of the figure.”

In the PAAM show, there are many examples that speak to this mystery, but they are grounded in a certain reality, as well. For example, her piece Self Portrait with Oven Mitt and Loaded Brush is a large-scale painting at 80×70 inches, depicting multiple versions of the self, engaged in different aspects of life. It speaks to the experience of being both an artist and a caretaker of other people, a mother, with all of the emotions that come with these things, the fatigue, and even hints of joy that operate in her psyche simultaneously. It is painted on mylar, which Reeves has used a lot and it has that illustrative quality of drawing that comes from her training, but mostly reflects a kinetic sense through its expressionistic approach.

For Reeves, the meaning in the work comes after the process, not as a conscious intention. In this sense the mystery is in the paint and it is just as surprising to the artist as it is to the viewer. She says it can be “quite emotional” when she realizes the meaning she’s communicated, after the fact. “Sometimes even way after it’s all done and I’ve put it away and then I pull it out again… I don’t always know what it’s about.”

Jackie Reeves: Larger than Life – Drawings in Time is on view through July 19 at the PAAM, 460 Commercial St. She will attend the opening reception on Friday, May 22, 6 p.m., and will speak in a Fredi Schiff Levin lecture ($15 Museum admission, free for PAAM members) on Thursday, May 28, 6 p.m. For more information, call 508.487.1750 or visit paam.org.