Islands Series

 

There is a particular quality of longing that belongs only to the view from the water — the island on the horizon that you can see clearly and cannot quite reach, the distant shape of trees and rock and light that organizes all that surrounding immensity into a single point of meaning. Islands is an ongoing series of over forty oil paintings exploring that longing, and what lies on the other side of it.

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The series moves between 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. The island was always a kind of tree.

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The series has its roots in a life lived on and near the water. The 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 island in these paintings is 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. Odysseus was kept on Calypso's island and longed for home. Prospero exiled himself to an island and found his power there. Crusoe built a world on his island from the wreckage of the old one. The island receives the exile, the artist, the saint, the sailor who has been too long at sea.

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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 sixteen by twenty inches and as large as thirty by sixty. It includes work on canvas and linen. What unifies them is not geography but grammar: in every painting, the island holds the center, the water holds the island, and the sky holds everything.

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The series works within the tradition of American maritime and atmospheric landscape painting — the Luminists Fitz Henry Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, and John Frederick Kensett, who discovered in the mid-nineteenth century that the horizon line and the quality of light over open water could carry metaphysical meaning without narrative or figure. It is also in conversation with Frederic Edwin Church's tropical island paintings, Winslow Homer's late seascapes, and the visionary nocturnes of Albert Pinkham Ryder.

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Among contemporary painters, the work of April Gornik — large-scale atmospheric landscapes in which light and weather carry the emotional freight — and the atmospheric island paintings of Neil Welliver provide the closest points of comparison. But the series has moved through these precedents into its own territory: paintings that are 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.

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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 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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As a young man Michael Francis Reagan served in the United States Navy during the Vietnam War and later worked as a Peace Corps graphic designer in West Africa. He has lived and painted for extended periods of time in Japan, Spain, Africa, and the islands of the South Pacific and Caribbean. He has camped on lake islands in the North American interior and studied the flat-topped acacias of the African littoral. For over thirty years he and his wife (Christine is a weaver) have lived and worked in the mountains of western North Carolina. They have four grown sons and three grandchildren.