Loren Reed Draws on Post-It Notes

These colorful stickies carry no shopping lists. They hold no agenda and there are no organized bullet points to review near the end of a workday. Loren Reed stores his Post-It Notes in a personalized red shoebox, hidden from refrigerators, office boards and counter tops. Daily reminders would thereby provide little information anyway.

So what good are they? What use is a notepad without memos or phone numbers?

Plenty.

Loren knows they are good enough for art, at least. A sketched illustration befriends each little square of paper with wit more sweet than an itinerary could possibly offer. This is Post-It Note Art. A few of Loren's handheld drawings represent friendly personified characters with crisp lines and a few lines of text absurd enough to be existential.

For example, his disappointed teddy bear muttering "Hrumph" even though he lives in an eco-friendly home.

Or, Jesus Christ sitting on a felled tree wondering: "What would I do?"

Other Post-Its are more richly textured, surveying bizarre locomotive machines as they roam across dystopian landscapes, vast and frightening. Some seem satirical, some are funny and a little sad, some want to be entire philosophies within themselves (I have one hanging in my bedroom saluting the fox as the snake of the dogs. This drawing is one I can imagine in Antoine de Saint Exupéry's idealistic novella, "The Little Prince"). Loren has stacks of sticky artwork, all of which delightfully created from plenty of cunning care. They all surely help him bypass a little boredom here and there. Also, all of them are only halfway completed. After drawing on the Post-It Notes, Loren puts the tiny art into a copy machine for drafted ground plans and blows them up to the size of a blueprint drawing. These enormous pieces look gritty, rough, or "impressionistic", as he calls them, resembling charcoal drawings than pen and ink.

His work is fast, down and dirty and can be made anywhere. It is interesting, humorous, and highly cost-effective. Hey, with America's dwindling economy stripping the public demand for art, Loren?s Post-It Note Art makes sense.

Loren Reed can hear out your own ideas, ideologies and illusions and give them some character on a sticky note. If you would to commission him for a project or book his work for a show, you can contact him at: ilovethispart@gmail.com


Originally Posted to The Boise Picayune on Tuesday, September 9, 2008