Nano Reid Exhibition
A Stylist in Art
A Machine Readable Version
Thomas MacGreevy
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Full Colophon Information[p.3]
It is not often that one can say of a youthful painter like Nano Reid that she is a born artist and a born stylist. But Miss Reid's latest exhibition, which opened at The Gallery, 7 St. Stephen's Green, yesterday, makes it quite clear that she is both. Her work will, without doubt, as the years go on, still grow richer in content and still more pointed in the matter of style; but already everything she does, whether in oils or water-colours, has artistic validity, and every statement she makes, whether with brush or pencil, has an "edge" to it. For her varied richness of invention, especially in the matter of colour, is balanced by an unusual economy in the means employed to express it. With a few strokes of her brush she can make boats at rest (as here in two water-colour studies of " Clogher Harbour ") seem funny and beautiful at once — a vivacious and touching poetry of effect which recalls the art of Raoul Dufy, though there is no trace of any debt to that distinguished Frenchman. Miss Reid's work is more solid than his. There may be some suggestion of the influence of Bonnard, as in a lovely oil study of an interior called "Preface to Metaphysics," but even beside that great artist's work Miss Reid's would probably hold its own. For it has personality and freshness of observation all the time, whether in the dazzling effect of the light on the water, seen through the bent trees in "Down to the Shore, Bantry ," or in the warm and beautifully harmonised pinks and blues of "Hillside Firs." And then " Coombola " and "The Crooked Road" strike another note still with their sombre atmospheric effect and powerful design. There seems to be no help for it. This young artist from Drogheda has to be saluted as a genius.