Michael Reedy‘s paintings and drawings pull together from a range of styles and methods. Blending together his incredible penchant for realism with medical illustration, op art, classical nudes, and other pictorial conventions, he creates a world and aesthetic that is uniquely his own.
He blurs the contentious boundaries between life and death, personhood and object, the beautiful and the ugly; laying one on top of the others like a series of scripts that can be read simultaneously and foster a complex range of emotions where beauty, love, pain, loss, and despair seem entwined and inseparable.
“I am struck with my fear of growing older and eventually losing my wife. Everything eventually seems to revolve around this point-of-tension between beauty and despair, between living and dying. However, it is this duality that makes life beautiful!
It is our ability to persevere in light of this duality that motivates much of my work. The characters that populate my work are only flirting with death – even the skeletons and skull portraits are very much living in my mind.”
Images courtesy of Michael Reedy
Discover: www.michaelreedy.gallery | www.archenemyarts.com/michael-reedy