Portland Fine Art

Gary Reddick

Gary Reddick has been an artist his whole life. Born in Baker, Oregon, Gary spent his early, formulative years in rural Eastern Oregon. A graduate of the University of Oregon, he has been a licensed architect since 1972; and in addition to his U.S. practice, he continues to work internationally, principally in China and the Middle East. His early rural upbringing, along with a wide international experience have come together to infuse his most current work as a painter.

Gary has exhibited his paintings in galleries locally, regionally and nationally for over 20 years, and has been a part of many invitational group shows. His work has moved, steadily, from portrait and representative landscape, to expressionistic scenes, to now… an intense pursuit of abstraction. It is this latest work that is truly the most expressive of his lifetime memory.

Sandra Stone, the writer, poet and art essayist has written of Gary Reddick’s work:
“How do you take the tradition of landscape and enliven it, give it a kinetic rush, imply a world that exists – not soundless, full of animal cries, earth smells burrowing behind the canvas? Region doesn’t need a name. It is the locale from which the heart sets out, taking in the autumn smells, smoke and its fume, wet leaves, the sound of rain on a boulder, a hat. Years later, memory is the fuse that ignites a body of work. Few, working in the genre of landscape today achieve a sense of electrical charge. Many paintings beautifully painted are about ‘beauty’, and the replication of it. They are not about the illusion of distance, or miles the painter has traveled, living in the interior. Reddick has the idea: It is not to know where you are going. The idea is to know it when you get there. In really knowing this region from the interior, in having photographed these places, in having clumped in high grasses through brambles, Reddick has come to the darker brink. He knows the trajectory. What is perceived is not necessarily what is. Gary Reddick knows when to stop. And when to let the image know itself.”