ISLANDS

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“These paintings are not invented — they come from sustained looking at specific water and specific light over many decades. But they are not documentary either. The islands in my paintings are always partly internal — the place the mind moves toward when the world becomes too much, the fixed point by which we navigate when everything around us is in motion. Every culture that has lived near the sea has understood the island as a form of spiritual geography.

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The island receives the exile, the artist, the saint, the sailor who has been too long at sea.”

 

Michael Francis Reagan

 

The Islands Series moves between three worlds. The oceanic paintings look outward: a single mangrove island in a turquoise Caribbean Sea, a volcanic peak in the Marquesas under a storm-lit sky, a scarlet-canopied atoll burning against a sunset gradient, islands glimpsed at moonrise and first light and in the long blue hour before dawn. These paintings ask the question every island asks: what is out there, and what would it mean to go?

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The inland paintings answer. In the lake country of the American North, islands are smaller and closer — rocky outcroppings with two spruce trees and room enough for a tent, blue tarpaulins visible through the conifers, campfire smoke rising into a still October morning. Someone has crossed the water and made a life, however temporary, in the place they were looking toward. The question the oceanic paintings pose becomes, in these quieter works, a condition: I am here. I am alone with this. This is what I came for.

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And then there are the tree paintings — a single African acacia on a coastal sand flat, another in a vast golden savanna with mountains behind it — which carry the series' argument into new geography. The island in these paintings is not surrounded by water but by space: the same organized solitude, the same quality of the singular thing that makes the landscape cohere around it. The stopping tree is an island. For me, the tree has always been a kind of island.​

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My work is simultaneously about specific places — a mangrove key in the Florida straits, a volcanic island in the Marquesas, a granite outcropping in a northern lake — and about the idea of the island as universal form. I think these new works are a natural evolution from my years spent as a map illustrator for National Geographic, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, and others, and a lifetime traveling and living around the world — a continuation of map as visual geography — but in these paintings I'm moving beyond the literal map and even beyond geography to a new grammar for me: the island holds the center, the water holds the island, and the sky holds everything.

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The Islands Series comprises work completed between 2023 and 2026, ranging in format from intimate studies to large-scale works. The series spans the tropics and the far north, the open ocean and the enclosed lake, dawn and midnight, storm and calm. It encompasses paintings as small as eleven by fourteen inches and as large as forty-eight by sixty. It includes work on canvas and linen and watercolor on paper. The oceanic and inland and tree paintings are designed to be shown in dialogue rather than separated, so that the viewer experiences the full movement of the series — from longing to arrival and back again.​

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Contact the artist's studio for available works. Scroll down to see examples of this series and click on each image for details: