Vicki Reynolds 1946 - 2008, Royal Academy Gallery Café until April 1st. “I can hardly believe I’m real”
This exhibition is a celebration of the life and work of the Artist Vicki Reynolds. Vicki was born in Portsmouth in 1946 and studied at Goldsmiths’ College and the Royal Academy Schools where she was awarded the Richard Ford Travelling Scholarship.
still life
pencil on paper
400 X 454 cm
“In the beginning was the word” says the bible and much of contemporary art practice, but Vicki Reynolds had no time at all for wordy explanations of her sensual experience of the world. 
The Red Fence
oil pastel
20 X 29 cmShe said that “Painting is a way of being alive, not a way of life”. Each new day, presented a new opportunity to get to grips with the impossible, but wonderful task of imaging what her body experienced. Vicki’s art work lacks any kind of pretension and she once said that when making work she felt just the same as she did when drawing at her mother´s kitchen table when she was a little girl.
Brockley Cemetry
oil 600 X 410 cm
Vicki was totally committed to her work and completely dismissive of the passing fashions that she felt plagued contemporary art practice. Her work is ambitious, but her attitude was rather self effacing and unpretentious and she resisted all attempts by her friends to organise a major show of her work during her lifetime.
Unfinished landscape
500 X 501cm
It sounds obvious to say that to understand Vicki’s work you have to look at the image itself, but actually looking at an image is a complicated business and makes considerable demands on the viewer. Unlike much of contemporary work, there is no text, what you see is what you get, but what you see will develop the more you look. In Vicki’s late work, the image was never separated from that that was imaged and there was a constant reference from one to the other.
If you look at her work with as few preconceptions as possible, then you will unlock the love, obsession and experience that is present in all her images.
David Hawkins
A space to exchange ideas about the exhibition is at:
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