Skip to main content

Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

American, 1938-2015
ROBERT JAMES REED (1938-2014) earned his BFA (1960) and MFA (1962) at the Yale School of Art where in 1969 he became professor of painting and printmaking at Yale School of Art. He taught there until his death in 2014. As a student he assisted the influential Josef Albers in the technical production of color plates for Albers’s iconic work, Interaction of Color published in 1963. Reed became tenured in 1987, as the school’s first and only African American professor. In an interview, he said that he did not seek to distinguish himself through his racial identity but preferred to see himself as an artist who was African American. It is this self identification that could account for the fact that he is rarely grouped with other African American artists of his time like Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, David Driscoll and Faith Ringgold. Nonetheless, the symbols, colors and forms of his work draw upon his experience as a African American man. He produced works that are largely grouped by decades. In the 1970’s he developed the Plum Nellie series, exploring the Interaction of Color in his own terms. The meaning of Plum Nelly is not clear, although it may mean ‘you’re nearly there’. In the 1980’s, the San Romano series Reed regarded the gorgeous Paulo Uccello’s 15th Century paintings of the Battle of San Romano between the Republics of Florence and Sienna. These three panels are rendered in newly developing Renaissance perspective, in saturated colors and complex compositions. Reed’s last group was produced in the 1990’s called Tree For Mine where is childhood home in Charlottesville VA is the source for his painterly investigations.
to
2
Overall Width
to
Overall Height
to
2
1
1
1
1
2
2
1
1
2
137
110
89
77
2
2
Artist: Robert Reed
SAN ROMANO: BLACK NINE
By Robert Reed
Located in Portland, ME
Reed, Robert (American, 1938-2014). SAN ROMANO: BLACK NINE. Mixed media, collage, assemblage. painted and colored papers and office staples, not dated, but ...
Category

1980s Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Drafting Film, Watercolor

PLUM NELLIE - BEAR HUG
By Robert Reed
Located in Portland, ME
Reed, Robert (American, 1938-2014). PLUM NELLIE, BEAR HUG. Mixed media on paper, 1979. Titled, signed, dated, and further inscribed in the margin below the image. 22 1/2 x 34 1/2 inc...
Category

1970s Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

Related Items
Rhodes: modern Italian watercolor of abstract Greek landscape & architecture
Located in Bryn Mawr, PA
This is a minimalist watercolor painting depicting abstracted architectural features (windows & doorway) in red and blue with the landscape and ocean of Rhodes, Greece visible. The watercolor itself measures 9.5"x6.5" and is floated in a double-mat 16.5" x 13" narrow, contemporary wood (maple) frame. Signed, titled, and dated on the back of the watercolor paper. Diego Esposito...
Category

1970s Abstract Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

Autumn Biogram of the Nelson
By Kory Twaddle
Located in Kansas City, MO
Artist : Kory Twaddle "Autumn Biogram of the Nelson" Newsprint, graphite, conté crayon pastel, charcoal, beeswax, cardboard, paper, gingko leaves, stickers, and Mixed Media on drawi...
Category

2010s Abstract Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paint, Paper, Conté, Charcoal, India Ink, Acrylic, Tempera, Watercolor, ...

Original-Drawing Time Series-Gladiolus-PleinAir-Brit Awarded Artist-Ink on paper
Located in London, GB
The Summer Bloom Series is an ongoing project that Shizico Yi returns to each summer, painting en plein air in her garden. She began gardening in 2015 to create a healing space for h...
Category

2010s Abstract Expressionist Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Charcoal, Ink, Graphite, Gouache

"#224 – ABANDONED, SEPARATED", ink, pencil, gouache, found book, poetry, virus
By Amy Williams
Located in Toronto, Ontario
"#224 – ABANDONED, SEPARATED" is from Amy Williams' series A Farewell to Arms – wherein the artist works directly onto page 224 of a found copy of Ernest ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Found Objects, Ink, Gouache, Pencil

"#186 – WOUNDED WERE COMING", ink, pencil, gouache, found vintage book, poetry
By Amy Williams
Located in Toronto, Ontario
"#186 – WOUNDED WERE COMING" is from Amy Williams' series A Farewell to Arms – wherein the artist works directly onto pages of a found copy of Ernest Hemingway's WWII romance novel. The artist selects certain words and phrases from page 186 to isolate as a poem, and then draws, inks, redacts and paints the rest of the page according to the text. The resulting poem reads "The wounded were coming / men that were scared / I felt the rain in my face / It was getting dark." – Hemingway's novel is a doomed romance between a wounded American soldier and an Italian nurse – note the feminine form on the page, with a "dress" or apron that looks skeletal, bloody and rained upon, all at once. From Amy Williams – "My recent work is focused on making treated book pages using a found vintage...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Found Objects, Ink, Gouache, Pencil

Dexter's Choice, State II, signed mixed media watercolor (unique variant) Framed
By Larry Zox
Located in New York, NY
Larry Zox Dexter's Choice, State II, ca. 1990 Mixed media, Watercolor pochoir, and Oil stick Wax, Water-Based Crayons, on heavy Arches museum watercolor rag paper with deckled edges 40 × 60 in 101.6 × 152.4 cm Edition 8/30 (unique variant) Frame included Measurements: Sheet: 40 inches (vertical) by 60 inches (horizontal) Frame: 42 inches x 62 inches x 1 inch Dexter's Choice, State # II is a unique, mixed media work from an edition of 30 unique variants done in pochoir, (25 stencils, 14 colors). Here, Zox uses watercolor instead of inks, which is applied to heavy 300 lb. watercolor paper. Although it is a multiple signed and numbered from the edition of 30, each work of art is unique because of how the paper receives the watercolor brush. In addition, this work is created like a mixed media painting because it has 11 lines added by hand with wax and water based crayons and oil sticks. The unique watercolor technique that Zox employed in making "Dexter's Choice" is documented in the textbook, "Screen Printing: Water Based Techniques,Roni Henning, NYIT ". Dexter's Choice was published by Images Gallery, and this work was acquired directly from the publisher before they sold out. This work is elegantly floated and framed in a white wood frame. Accompanied by gallery issued Certificate of Guarantee Larry Zox Biography: A PAINTER who played an essential role in the Color Field discourse of the 1960s and 1970s, Larry Zox is best known for his intensely and brilliantly colored geometric abstractions that question and violate symmetry.1 Zox stated in 1965: “Being contrary is the only way I can get at anything.” To Zox, this position was not necessarily arbitrary, but instead meant “responding to something in an examination of it [such as] using
a mechanical format with X number of possibilities.”2 What he sought was to “get at the specific character and quality of each painting in and for itself,” as James Monte stated in his introductory essay in the catalogue for Zox’s 1973–1974 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.3 Zox’s robust paintings reveal
a celebrated artist and master of composition who is explored and challenged the possibilities of Post-Painterly Abstraction and Minimalist pictorial conventions. Zox began to receive attention in the 1960s when he was included in several groundbreaking exhibitions of Color Field and Minimalist art, including Shape and Structure (1965), organized by Henry Geldzahler and Frank Stella for Tibor de Nagy, New York, and Systemic Painting (1966), organized by Lawrence Alloway for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 1973–1974, the Whitney’s solo exhibition of Zox’s work gave recognition to his significance in the art scene of the preceding decade. In the following year, he was represented in the inaugural exhibition of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Wahsington, DC, which acquired fourteen of his works.
 Zox was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1937. He attended the University of Oklahoma and Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, and then studied under George Grosz at the Des Moines Art Center. In 1958, Zox moved to New York, joining the downtown art scene. His studio on 20th Street became a gathering place for artists, jazz musicians, bikers, and boxers, and he occasionally sparred with visiting fighters. He later established a studio in East Hampton, a former black smithy used previously by Jackson Pollock. In his earliest works, such as Banner (1962) Zox created
collages consisting of pieces of painted paper stapled onto sheets of plywood. He then produced paintings that were illusions of collages, including both torn- and trued-edged forms, to which he added a wide range of strong hues that created ambiguous surfaces. In paintings such as For Jean (1963), he omitted the collage aspect of his work and applied flat color areas to create more complete statements of pure color and shape. He then replaced these torn and expressive edges with clean and impersonal lines that would define his work for the next decade. From 1962 to 1965, he produced his Rotation series, at first creating plywood and Plexiglas reliefs, which turned squares into dynamic polygons. He used these shapes in his paintings as well, employing white as a foil between colors to produce negative spaces that suggest that the colored shapes had only been cut out and laid down instead of painted. The New York Times in 1964 wrote of the works in show such as Rotation B (1964) and of the artist: “The artist is hip, cool, adventurous, not content to stay with the mere exercise of sensibility that one sees in smaller works.”4 In 1965, he began the Scissor Jack series, in which he arranged opposing triangular shapes with inverted Vs of bare canvas at their centers that threaten to split their compositions apart. In several works from this series, Zox was inspired by ancient Chinese water vessels. With a mathematical precision and a poetic license, Zox flattened the three dimensional object onto graph paper, and later translated his interpretation of the vessel’s lines onto canvas with masking tape, forming the structure of the painting. The Diamond Cut and Diamond Drill paintings...
Category

1990s Color-Field Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Crayon, Oil, Watercolor, Monoprint, Mixed Media, Graphite

"#56 – BOTH WOUNDED A LITTLE", ink, pencil, gouache, collage, found text, poetry
By Amy Williams
Located in Toronto, Ontario
"#56 – BOTH WOUNDED A LITTLE" is from Amy Williams' series A Farewell to Arms – wherein the artist is working directly onto page 56 of a found copy of Ernest Hemingway's WWII romance...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Found Objects, Ink, Gouache, Pencil

"#71 – THEN IT'S HOPELESS?", ink, pencil, gouache, found vintage book, poetry
By Amy Williams
Located in Toronto, Ontario
"#71 – THEN IT'S HOPELESS?" is from Amy Williams' series A Farewell to Arms – wherein the artist is working directly onto page 71 of a found copy of Ernest Hemingway's WWII romance novel. The artist selects certain words and phrases from the page to isolate as a poem, and then draws, inks, redacts and paints the rest of the page according to the text of the poem. Here the poem reads: "Then it's hopeless? / But sometimes I cannot hope. / I cannot." Note the poem is outlined in dark red and purple radiating lines, while outside there are lighter violet, blue and white lines. From Amy Williams – "My recent work is focused on making treated book pages using a found vintage...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Found Objects, Ink, Gouache, Pencil

Untitled
By Matthew Kolodziej
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Untitled Watercolor, cut out and construction on paper, 2013 Signed and dated in pencil lower right Condition: Excellent Image size: 22 x 30 inches Frame size: 30 x 37 inches Archiv...
Category

2010s Contemporary Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

"#227 – I WAS AFRAID", ink, pencil, gouache, found book, poetry, coronavirus
By Amy Williams
Located in Toronto, Ontario
"#227 – I WAS AFRAID" is from Amy Williams' series A Farewell to Arms – wherein the artist works directly onto pages of a found copy of Ernest Hemingway's WWII romance novel. The art...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Found Objects, Ink, Gouache, Pencil

"#152 – GOOD GIRL", ink, pencil, gouache, found vintage book, hemingway, poetry
By Amy Williams
Located in Toronto, Ontario
"#152 – GOOD GIRL" is from Amy Williams' series A Farewell to Arms – wherein the artist is working directly onto page 152 of a found copy of Ernest Heming...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Found Objects, Ink, Gouache, Pencil

"Codicis Liber", Contemporary Monotype with Chine Colle and Watercolor
By Michael Pauker
Located in Soquel, CA
Contemporary abstract painting and collage composition of stamps, various types of paper, and watercolor by Michael Pauker (American, b. 1957), 2009. Titled "Codicis Liber", which is...
Category

Early 2000s Contemporary Robert Reed Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Robert Reed abstract drawings and watercolors for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Robert Reed abstract drawings and watercolors available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Robert Reed in paint, watercolor, drafting film and more. Not every interior allows for large Robert Reed abstract drawings and watercolors, so small editions measuring 36 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Mark di Suvero, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., and Carl Andre. Robert Reed abstract drawings and watercolors prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $4,800 and tops out at $20,000, while the average work can sell for $12,400.

Recently Viewed

View All