Her World

Radically reappraising the landscape genre, Reggie Burrows Hodges paints Her World in hazy, ethereal brushstrokes which probe the imprecision of memory, examining the interrelationship between subject and environment. Hodges strikingly primes his white canvas with an inky black ground, over which he layers forms and pigment with a painterly confidence. His solitary figure emerges out from this dark ground, materialized in recessive space and stripped of identifying context, facing away from the viewer and gazing up toward the distant lighthouse which crowns the composition. Hodges evocatively describes his artistic inspiration being “the study of moments and translating the essence of them through color, figuration, abstraction, and various techniques of mark making… I’m interested in intersecting an internal experience and symbolizing that in my work in order to present a view of my personal heritage and journey” (quoted in “Reggie Burrows Hodges,” Joan Mitchell Foundation, online [accessed 03/12/25]).
Hodges’s title, Her World, alludes to Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, held in The Museum of Modern Art. Both artists depict a Maine landscape with an unconventional composition wherein the horizon line is placed at the upper limits of the canvas, establishing a profound sense of recessive space via atmospheric perspective. Both works include a solitary female figure viewed from behind whose confronting gaze lies upon the horizon. While Wyeth’s figure is a portrait, depicting his neighbor defiant in the face of her polio diagnosis, Hodges’s figure is shrouded in anonymity, embracing tenuous ambiguities and integrating her within the painted environment. The artist attends carefully to each part of his composition, the potent, looming red barn articulated just as carefully as the background lighthouse or the foregrounded figure. Hodges privileges neither figure nor landscape, integrating both within his serene tableau.