“I had been thinking about them in the back of my head for a few months while I was working on other deadlines,” he says. He had an idea of what he was going to draw before he set to work on them. “I started all nine pieces at the exact same time. I mount the paper on the board and I do a really loose outline and then lay them all next to each other and I go from there, slowly refining over and over.”
There is a sculptural aspect to his drawings. “I tend to think very sculpturally,” he explains. “This is the form that I want this to take; now I need to shade it and make it look dimensional and figure out how the forms interact in three dimensions with each other.”
Sometimes he makes actual sculptures as well, although, admittedly, this happens less often than he would like. “It feels very natural to me and every time I do it, I’m like, ‘This is amazing. This feels amazing. I literally only want to do this for the rest of my life,’” he says. “Somehow, I stop. I have a deadline or something. I stop doing it and I never get back to it for another year.” He says that he would like sculpture to be a regular part of his practice, bringing figures similar to his drawings into three-dimensional realm.
My stuff gets creepy. It’s kind of strangely cute sometimes, which isn’t really intentional,” he says. “It’s just that what comes out of me.”
Reidt paints as well, but says that this comes out of a different process that he’s trying to modify so that it is closer to how he works with graphite. “I’ve been wrestling with that, trying to figure out a new method of painting that’s similar to drawing, that allows me to explore forms and pull shapes out and get colors where I want them and richen them up where I want to richen them up,” he says. “I started glazing and using quick-drying mediums for doing more layering and glazing so that I can haze stuff out like graphite and push and pull a little, more like graphite. It seems to be working pretty well so far, so I’m going to keep going with that, just let it evolve, I guess, see where it goes.”
At the time of this interview, he had four pieces in the Dark Art 2019 group show at Beinart in Australia that coincided with Chet Zar’s solo show, The Administrators, at the gallery.
He says that he doesn’t necessarily see his work as dark art. “I enjoy the dark art scene. I like creepy art, but I don’t necessarily consider myself a dark artist,” he says. “Some other people might feel differently. I don’t have a problem with that at all.”
There’s a bit of a dichotomy in Reidt’s art. Yeah, he is attracted to the surreal and the grotesque, and he says he likes “awkwardness,” but he’s not trying to freak out the viewer. “My stuff gets creepy. It’s kind of strangely cute sometimes, which isn’t really intentional,” he says. “It’s just that what comes out of me.”*
This article first appeared in Hi-fructose Issue 53,, which is sold out. Get our latest issue in print when you subscribe to Hi-Fructose here.
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