My life & Influences

   For over fifty years I specialized in hand-painted original maps and editorial illustrations for books and magazines including National Geographic, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, Harper’s, Audubon, and many others. 225 of Reagan's original illustrated maps are in the collection of the Map and Atlas Museum in La Jolla, California and will eventually be permanently housed at The Library of Congress. My hand-painted maps and paintings can also be found in private, corporate, and museum collections throughout the world. In recent years, while still creating maps, I've been concentrating on a series of landscapes and seascapes in oil and watercolor which can be seen in a number of galleries.

​

   I was born in the piney woods of South Arkansas but grew up at many different army bases around the world including Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, Ft. Benning, Georgia and bases in Japan and Germany. At the age of five I demonstrated an interest in art and was enrolled in drawing and painting classes in Japan and later Germany. I joined the Navy at the age of seventeen during the Vietnam War and afterwards drifted out to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco where I worked as a Digger (picking up leftover food from restaurants and distributing it to the needy) and evolved into a full-fledged flower child which at heart I have remained. I then worked my way around the islands of the South Pacific and the Caribbean working various manual labor jobs eventually ending up back in Arkansas where I somehow managed to get into college. I majored in Art & American Literature and then studied painting at the University of Arkansas MFA program with an emphasis in painting and art history. After college, I became the art director for KATV in Little Rock and then art director for various magazines and ad agencies in Miami and Chicago. I then accepted an assignment with the Peace Corps in Ivory Coast West Africa, where I worked as a graphic designer and illustrator of textbooks, but more importantly, where I met I met future wife, Christina Rosalia. After the Peace Corps, we lived for a while in Miami, Chicago, and Little Rock, leaving each city with one or two more children, and eventually settled in the mountains of western North Carolina where we've lived for over 30 years. We share a studio and paint and weave (Christine is a weaver) side by side. We have four grown sons and three grandchildren.

 

   So many artists have influenced my work and sensibility, but probably none more than the ancient Japanese landscape artists. At the age of five I was taught to paint and draw by a Japanese artist and I knew even then I would also become an artist or better said, I think I realized I was born an artist. I lived in Japan from the age of five to seven and those memories of that little coastal fishing village have stayed with me and formed my way of seeing the world.

 

   So, other than Japan, throughout my life I've lived in many places in the world like Germany, the South of Spain, and then a couple years in West Africa, and traveling across islands in the Pacific and Caribbean. I believe the experience of traveling and living in different countries and cultures, more than anything, has formed my sense of the world in general and landscape specifically - and my love of islands. And I'm sure traveling and living abroad led to my love of maps and my years as a map illustrator (see my Illustrated Maps portfolio). Also, please see the Africa series.

 

   I should also mention the American Tonalist painters Albert Pinkham Ryder and George Inness, and of course who has not been influenced by the great Vincent Van Gogh (both for his work and his life (see my tribute to him, Crows over Wheatfield in my oil portfolio. And for me, the one and only Francisco José de Goya's Black Paintings and his etchings of war. And the list could go on and on.

​

   So, after a long and happy life lived in paint I find myself still in love with the paint itself whether watercolor, acrylic or oil and whether it's representational or abstract. And still in love with all you artists out there that create your wonderful works, now and past, and more than ever still and always in love with the muse that shares my love of art - actually is my art and my heart - the beautiful and exotic Christina Rosalia.