"Heartfelt"
11 1/2"x4"
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At the Art Academy of Cincinnati during the late 1980s, Jean Reardon adopted a photorealist approach to printmaking. Selecting imagery from photographs taken herself, she manipulated and combined them in carefully designed compositions, incorporating borders, inset details, and bold contrasts of shape and value. During these years, she worked primarily in black and white and began the study of color that she continued to develop in print work from her new home of Hingham, Massachusetts.
Jean worked in a great scale with well-resolved compositions often featuring enormous flowers - tulips, daylilies, poppies, and trillium, for example. Her work was intense.
Reardon's signature subject matter originated in her lovingly tended backyard garden, represented in this show in finely detailed organic drawings often interwoven with geometric forms and given harmony through the use of dynamic color and strong composition. Well-drawn daylilies (for example, in “Daylilies” and “Celebrate”), fish, hydrangea (“Descending Arches”) or gingko leaves turning color (“After the Fall”) are beautifully rendered in watercolor and the mixed media with which Reardon experimented.
She graduated from Manhattanville College in 1962 with a B.A. in English and from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1988 with a B.F.A. “Remembering Jean is to recall a truly vibrant woman with awesome energy and complete mastery of multi-tasking,” recalls Anne Miotke, adjunct professor of art at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and Jean's painting professor at the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1986 to 1988. “Jean's works, although visually beautiful, go beyond the superficial and have true sustaining power,” Miotke remarks. “[They] tap deep into the viewer's soul.”
In a personal statement written before her death, Jean Reardon said, “As a painter and printmaker I seek to present my personal perception of the world of nature through selective and subjective realism.” The boldly rendered prints in “Larger than Life” exemplify the spirit of these words, beckoning viewers to both celebrate the glory of nature bursting forth, as well as appreciate the subtleties of pulsating life underfoot (as delineated in Reardon's very fine drawings of organic materials and forms).
The fine art of printmaking is often misunderstood. A noteworthy print that appears straightforward to the untrained eye is actually the product of years of experience and training. Only at this level can the artist envision a final concept before execution and achieve a sophisticated technical execution that often involves multiple complex processes. Jean successfully mastered these techniques in print works created between 1940 and 2001, the year in which she died of complications from surgery.
Leading a vigorous, multifaceted life as wife, mother (of five sons), grandmother, community volunteer, gardener, decorator, and designer/maker of children's clothing – in addition to her full-fledged career as an artist -- Jean Reardon touched many others with her tremendous generosity of spirit.
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