Bedrooms & Bars – Ed Reynolds

“For me, it’s really the joy of looking out into the world and getting this positive energy… It’s opening up our vision, and how we look.” – David Hockney

‘He has tasted good and evil in your bedrooms and your bars…’. So sings the late Kris Kristofferson on his track ‘The Pilgrim – Chapter 33’ – making a point about the inextricable link between these two settings, where fun is had, mistakes are made and tall tales told. With that song very much in mind, Bedrooms & Bars is the title of a show of new work by Ed Reynolds in which further parallels are drawn between these intimate spaces. Featuring over a dozen oil on canvas paintings, a visual theme quickly emerges throughout the show of light flooding into darker spaces, picking out highlights and reflections on polished bar tops and floors, barstool legs and window sills, on whisky bottles and pint glasses, leather seats, light fixtures and musical instruments, all underpinned by a soundtrack that mixes audio from the very places depicted.

These bedrooms and bars are, by nature and design, inviting spaces. Reynolds, musing on the parallels between the two, says ‘everyone can relate to that feeling where you’re lying in bed, just looking out the window, and lots of stuff is happening in your brain, your thought stream flooded… well it’s the same in bars: that intimacy, that reflection or contemplation.’ The notion brings David Hockney’s series of iPad drawings to mind – his ‘My Window’ series of fleeting moments seen through the artist’s bedroom window, but also meditations on the passage of time and of light. ‘The bedroom is as much a place for contemplation as the bar is a place to go to rest’, Ed adds.

The majority of the pubs portrayed are in Belfast. Some look familiar, some less so, but this is beside the point: it is the feeling of being in a bar during the daytime that I suspect Ed is after, and it is that which is so relatable. Pubs are dark, inviting places – spaces where you feel drawn in and, generally speaking, the world is shut out. Traditional, dark, pub interiors mean that, even on overcast days, daylight floods in but the world is shut out by some combination of window level, frosted glass or signage. Ed sets up his canvas and oil paints and gets to work, focusing entirely on the task at hand, the chasing of the light, knowing when to finish when an hour or 90 minutes pass and the light has changed completely. All works are begun in situ and if needed, finished in the studio with a couple of reference photos as a guide. Being in the moment is essential for this work – by its nature ‘painting or any creativity is an exercise in mindfulness’ the artist confirms.

This need to work in situ is important for Reynolds in other ways too. ‘Everything happens very naturally: I begin the initial sketch of an interior and seating and then somebody always comes to sit, and unbeknownst to them, they end up as central figures in the painting’. The painting of The Sunflower pub is one such example. In the work, light pools on the tiled floor, also illuminating a table top, a green leather stool and the tip of a solitary character’s head and collar, someone seemingly engaged in reading the paper and enjoying a quiet pint. I say ‘seemingly’ as everything is beautifully suggested, conjured from intangible light. In this case, the man in question did not know he was being painted and just happened to sit in. As Reynolds points out: ‘There is a certain serendipity to the composition of a lot of these artworks’. But of course, serendipity is not the only element. The artist seeks out those places and moments where things have the potential to happen. A confidence in working in public and enjoying the process of actively engaging with people while painting is an essential skill that Reynolds has built up over the years.

Daytime drinking seems less acceptable here than, say, in continental Europe – an attitude that perhaps says more about our relationship to alcohol than the practice itself. However, the solitary characters Ed depicts in these atmospheric pieces do not form a single type and to cast them in this way is a judgement that the artist avoids. ‘They can be regulars or they might be just in for one pint, they might be visiting the town, checking out the ales. Contemplation has a lot to do with it.’

I find myself thinking about days (more common in the past than now) where one daytime pint becomes two, and so on until a tipping point is reached, a communal decision made, and all plans go out the window… Reynolds reminisces on those days too – great fun but at the end ‘you’re left with nothing, absolutely nothing!’ or as Kristofferson might ask of his titular pilgrim – ‘if the goin’ up was worth the comin’ down?’. Conversely, Ed’s daytime pub and bedroom peregrinations have not left him with nothing. Instead he has amassed a body of work of considerable beauty that captures the fleeting, the evocative and the perpetually inviting.

Jonathan Brennan, March 2025.