By MiChelle Jones • FOR THE TENNESSEAN • MARCH 7, 2010

Michelle Firment Reid has quite a backstory. She grew up in Romania, Paris and the Philippines before her CIA family settled near the company's headquarters in Langley, Va. Reid even worked in the CIA's graphics and disguise department during high school and college.

Now she paints in a loft located in a former brothel in Tulsa, Okla., where her at once ethereal and wildly energetic paintings are informed both by big sky and the peeling layers of vintage wallpaper in her studio.

Reid makes her debut solo show at Gallery One with Tender, a series of paintings on view through March 20.

Reid's palette uses warm browns, deep blacks, vivid turquoise and cool whites and grays. Traces of texture and pattern, as well as snippets of handwriting, emerge from her layered compositions.

On a continuum

In a previous series, Reid explored the idea of the fate of thoughts and words after they are expressed.

She imagined them being carried away by flocks of birds. Her birds and words became more and more abstract: The birds became as simple as the "m" birds of children; the writing became a mere suggestion of words.

"It's almost taking the idea of script and making it art instead of trying to force the words on the canvas," Reid says. "Everyone gets that it's writing. Whether they're from Russia or Israel or Peru, they gets that it's writing."

In later paintings, writing peeks in and out of layers, sometimes visible only through patches of scratched off paint.

Excavating meaning

Reid's layering of paint and texture reflect themes of stacked memory and dialogue and are also evidence of her printmaking background.

"It's almost like pulling up history or excavating a part of yourself, or a dialogue that you had with somebody or a place that you've been and you're going back," she says.

Like a song

Reid likens painting and working in series to writing a song, with a similar reliance on structure - beginning, middle and end - and rhythm. Though she doesn't intend for the paintings to be hung in a specific order, she does see each painting as a note or stanza.

"You're starting into it with the Tender 1 through 4 and then (there's) a crescendo with Wide Open," she says. The first four paintings use subtle mixes of brown and gold, with an occasional splash of white or color. Wide Open, on the other hand, is just that: a "loud" rush of turquoise and frenetic, roughly applied paint.

"Then you come down off of it and the last painting is Sea to Sky: Embrace," which was inspired by a summer trip to the Oregon coast. The painting uses nature, particularly the sun and sea, as a metaphor for give and take in relationships.

"I knew instantly that the work would appeal to me," says Gallery One's Shelley Liles McBurney. The paintings make her feel a range of emotions, she says, from "peaceful and perhaps even a bit melancholy to very vibrant."

"They have a quietness about them and also a little angst," Reid says.