Doel Reed, Church in the Valley, ca. 1969-70

This masterful etching by Doel Reed features a New Mexico village in the Hondo Valley surrounded by a rich and abstracted mountainscape. The humble church is lit by the shifting and flattening effects of the brilliant southwestern light. A pattern of light and dark is in play as in all of Doel Reed’s graphic works.

Born in Indiana, Reed studied drawing as a boy at the John Herron Art Museum in Indianapolis. Following high school, he apprenticed with an architect for four years, after which he enrolled at the Cincinnati Art Academy, where Frank Duveneck and Joseph Henry Sharp were on the faculty. After service in World War I, Reed returned to the Academy in Cincinnati. Reed was inspired by Francisco Goya’s aquatints to study printmaking.

Reed found a position at Oklahoma A&M College (renamed Oklahoma State University) and he was the first art instructor to be hired by the college. His expertise in printmaking distinguished the art department that Reed developed. The artist spent two sabbaticals in Paris, coming into contact with the vanguard of modernist art.

Reed began going to Taos in the summers during World War II and eventually became a summer resident. In 1959, after his retirement, he began living in nearby Talpa full time. As Harry Cohen and Ann Rogers state in their work on the artist, he would go on “solo day trips to the surrounding small Spanish villages near his home, paying particular attention to the pattern of light and dark passages and emotional quality that struck inside him.”

Considered a true “master of the aquatint,” he would describe himself as a “a purist,” and attest that “aquatint offers … a broad field for the expression of beauty, strength, and drama.” In addition to his series of female nudes and pure landscapes, Doel Reed created scenes of adobe houses, churches, and chapels. Reed created studies in the field with crayon and ink, later using them to complete paintings and prints in his studio. He described his goal as not “to copy nature as I find it, but rather to record facts and moods which excite the imagination.”

As Mary Carroll Nelson notes in The Legendary Artists of Taos:

His aquatints are . . . lit with an arbitrary light and shadowed with an impenetrable darkness, giving an effect somewhere between night and day in an unspecified timelessness. . . [he] favors molded adobe walls—some only remnants—closed and silent. . . The aquatint is given a soft quality by the rosin sprinkled over the metal plate before it is exposed to acid. Reed controls the etching process of aquatint masterfully . . .

Reed was elected to the National Academy of Design for graphic arts and became a full member in 1952. He published Doel Reed Makes an Aquatint in 1965. His artworks are held in many important collections.

Refs.: Cohen, Harry B. & Ann L. Rogers, Doel Reed, N.A.: The Graphic Works (1998), pp. 7, 12, 15, 85, no. 128; Nelson, Mary Carroll The Legendary Artists of Taos (1980), p. 160; Porter, Dean A, Teresa Hayes Ebie, & Suzan Campbell, Taos Artists and Their Patrons (1999), p. 380; Reed, Doel, Doel Reed Makes and Aquatint (1965 – Reprinted in Cohen & Rogers), p. 96; Samuels, Peggy & Harold Samuels, Samuels’ Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West (1985), p. 392.