A “quiet but dramatic coincidence” — that’s how the painter Robert Reed, ART ’62, characterized the invitation he received in 1987 to exhibit at the Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Va., the city where he was born and raised. For a painter who used geometrical design and abstract expression to represent childhood memories, Reed’s return Charlottesville — after 35 years of self-imposed exile — was a moment of great serendipity.
I never met Robert Reed, but his image loomed over me. Installed right outside of the basement studio where I took my first college art class was a placard dedicated to Reed, Yale School of Art’s former Director of Undergraduate Studies and professor of painting and printmaking for almost 50 years. His smiling, bearded face and the dedication Robert Reed, (1938–2014) ushered me, chronically late, into Basic Drawing every other day. My dad, a painter and teacher at the School of Art, mentioned his mentor “Bob Reed” a few times. At this point, I made a mental diagram: the placard, the mentor, and a little further away — me.
Three months ago, I sat amongst a group of 13 other students on the veranda of our new home, a gîte in Southwest France. We were attending orientation for English S247: “Travel Writing,” and his name came up again. Robert Reed, the explanation for why Yale’s travel writing course is in Auvillar, France. Reed founded Yale’s “Studio Practice in Painting and Drawing” program in Auvillar, which he directed until he died of cancer in 2014. In the same room that I sat in daily, learning how to write with a village as my muse, is where Reed and his 13 students painted and “investigated” objects of their choosing. It couldn’t be. A quiet and dramatic coincidence.
I was informed by my instructor, who didn’t know much about Reed, that at the end of the program, Reed and his students went down to the River Garonne and burned their summer creations. It was a fantastic imagined scene — a Viking funeral for thousands of beautiful art pieces — and one that inspired reactions from all of my peers: “Burned?!” “Why?!”
I began my task. I wrote a lot about family, childhood memories, and, to the best of my ability, the village that I was inhabiting. Towards the end of my time in Auvillar, I started to feel Reed’s shadow encroach upon me. Gaining clarity on who the man was and what he saw in this place felt necessary to reconcile what this experience ultimately meant to me. But learning more about him required a 30-minute infraction of my internet sabbatical, a policy inspired by Reed, whose students were cut off completely from laptops, cell phones, and headphones.
According to Amra Saric, TC ’17, who wrote about her experience in the studio practice program, each student dedicated themselves to one object and would make up to 100 pieces a day, ranging in size and medium, from their object of choice.At the end of the day, the fruits of their labor would be subjected to a group critique, which Reed called an “observation.”
Reed’s hallmark first assignment is what most of his former students mention. 50 drawings from observation in the timespan between two class meetings (one and a half days). The story behind the infamous 50 drawings is less known. According to my dad, in Reed’s first class, the professor assigned his students 15 drawings each. After class, one student approached him and asked whether he said 15 or 50. “In that moment, he realized that overachieving Yale students would do the work, no matter what,” my dad explained. So from then on, it was 50 instead of 15.
I decided that on one of my last days in Auvillar, I was going to commit to doing the accidental assignment: in one day, I was going to do 50 drawings of one object from observation. I wasn’t going to half-ass them. I wasn’t even going to quarter-ass them. Not even the gastro-intestinal issues I woke up to were going to hold me back.
My object of choice was an abandoned snail shell I found in the brush. It was small enough to carry around with me wherever I went. I discovered that there are many ways to draw a shell. If you’re like me, you’ll start off by drawing the object from different angles. Once you’ve covered every angle, you’ll move on to using various materials: colored pencils, pens, etc… If you are me, in a fit of repetition-induced insanity, you’ll use the dirt from inside the shell, a stapler to construct a punk representation of the shell, and a bunch of little eyes in the form of the shell that would concern most people who love you.
At some point, I took a break from drawing and went outside, where the shell was out of sight, out of mind. I ate a few ripe grapes that hung from the rafters. I thought about Robert Reed, and how sick he was during his last summer in Auvillar. He was in the hospital for most of the time, and had his teaching fellow pick up his slack. He must have known that he was going to die.
Did he savor his last moments in Auvillar? Did he wake up early to buy fresh croissants when he could stomach them? Did he let conversations with his students linger, despite his reputation for being a recluse? Did he watch the breeze spill through a field of sunflowers, was he brought back to his childhood in Virginia? From what others have told me about him, I’m guessing that he focused on his student’s work up to the last point. On teaching.
I thought more about mortality in my month in Auvillar than I had since a close family friend died. I came in strong with my first assignment, which I less-than-tactfully ended with the line “I feel death.” Maybe it was inspired by the horrifying images of tar-black lungs and gray, bloated cadavers that decorate the cigarette packets in Europe. If so: touché, France.
I think, though, it was brought on by the fact that I’ve been reflecting a lot on life in Auvillar — on bits of my narrative that I want to capture, and, because of the pleasure I’ve taken in writing, how I want to be spending my time on earth. It’s like I’ve been drafting a satisfying, premature obituary for myself.
I’m drawn to Reed because of what baffles me about him. He had such important things to say — about the black experience, about growing up in Charlottesville — and had such a compelling language to tell that story. But he chose instead to teach, and in doing so forfeited a lot of his own legacy as a painter.
One particularly stressful night during my first year at Yale, hunchbacked in a Bass cell, hopped up on Awake chocolates, I called my dad in a panic. I was taking all the wrong classes, I told him, and I had no direction. He waited for my crying to subside and then told me about how, when he was in college, he had no idea what he was doing. He majored in English and was scared to pursue art seriously because he had such a traumatic time in his first art class, his class with Reed. The point is, he didn’t know what he was doing, let alone the fact that he was going to be an artist. Then, years later, to my dad’s surprise, Reed told him that he was one of his favorite students. It was probably enough to vindicate my father’s devotion to painting.
I don’t know what I’m doing yet. How I’m going to make a living. If it will conveniently be “my passion.” If I’ll have a family, or at least in the nuclear sense. But I’m hitting the age when people refrain from telling me, “Oh honey, it’s too early to be thinking about that!” So here I am, thinking about it.
If I am lucky to leave any legacy, I want it to be the Bob Reed brand of legacies. I want people to remember me in absurd assignments. I want 21-year-olds to loosely attribute their existence to me. I want a lot of people to be happier because of me, whether it’s because I put them through a series of torturous drawings, or told them that they could do it.
Fifty Shells for Bob Reed was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
