biography
“When I start a painting in this Islands Series—any series really—the first thing I do is establish that beautiful blue line we call the horizon—a line that remains elusive and mysterious and in fact doesn't even exist. Yet, it's there, I can see it out there across the water, and something pulls me toward it. So, that's where I start. I lay down paint above and below that line and layer upon layer, tone upon tone, shapes begin to emerge—an island, the sky, the sea. All these elements are supporting images to the horizon, but it's not about them, and neither is about trying to make those images look "real." Over the course of three years and nearly fifty paintings in this series, I've come to understand it's not even about the horizon. It's about that void I see across the water—beyond the horizon and apart from the water, the island, and the sky—the longing to be there in that unknown place, the voyage, and then finally, the solitude that waits on the other side. And the colors I swim through to get there."
Michael Francis Reagan
For over fifty years Michael Francis Reagan 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. His 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 (see Illustrated Maps for examples), he has been concentrating on an ongoing series of landscapes and seascapes in oil and watercolor, Islands, and three additional series, African Horizons and Tashik-Tash and Falling.
Reagan was born in the piney woods of South Arkansas but grew up and lived for extended periods of time in Japan, Germany, Spain, West Africa, and North America. At the age of five he demonstrated an interest in art and was enrolled in drawing and painting classes in Japan and later Germany. He joined the Navy at the age of seventeen during the Vietnam War and afterwards drifted out to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco where he 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 he has remained. He then worked his way around the islands of the South Pacific and the Caribbean working various manual labor jobs eventually ending up back in Arkansas where he somehow (his words) managed to get into college. He 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, he became the art director for KATV in Little Rock and then art director for various magazines and ad agencies in Miami and Chicago. He then accepted an assignment with the Peace Corps in Ivory Coast West Africa, where he worked as a graphic designer and illustrator of textbooks, but more importantly, where he met his future wife, Christina Rosalia. After the Peace Corps, they 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 they've lived for over 30 years. They share a studio and paint and weave (Christine is a weaver) side by side. They have four grown sons and three grandchildren.