In 1983 I decided to get an MFA in painting. Although I was teaching full time as a painting instructor at a western MA boarding school, it was important to me to that I receive this MFA as I have always taken my painting very seriously. Three intense years later I received this degree in 1986.

I have painted a lifetime to finally arrive at what I have been chasing and striving for in my work. I pushed through making images and landscapes over the decades and now I see a continuum throughout all my work beginning in the seventies up to the present. What remains strong is my intuitive line energy, the movement, and surface tensions, pattern and color in my work.

I know what keeps me engaged with painting. It is the ambiguity, exploration and the challenge of responding to all of nature and its shapes around me. It is the continuous complex interchange between expressing movement, shape, and line in nature and the tensions between them all. The natural shapes outdoors are my jumping off point. I find it exciting to interpret all these shapes in an expressive way.

It is about showing up and just painting!

Marcia Reed