A native of Illinois, Gary Reed was raised in the small rural community of Woodstock. His talents and interests led him to pursue formal art training at Whitewater State University in Wisconsin. He also studied at the American Academy of Art in Chicago and at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida. For a time, he workded as a commercial artist, but soon found the field too limiting and restrictive. He subsequently adopted Hawaiʻi as his home and since 1971, has devoted full time to his own paintings and exhibitions. He has had numerous one-man shows in Honolulu, other parts of Hawaiʻi and on the Mainland. His paintings are represented in private art collections throughout the world. Reed says of his art: "What I paint is right out in the open, no hidden meanings, no abstractions. I can best say what I want to say with realistic art." He paints reality objectively, but not as if totally detached from that reality. It is painted empathetically, not sentimentally. Detail is reflected rather than accentuated by muted natural colors with soft yet deliberate brush strokes. Reed's paintings are concerned with every day themes, but they are not ordinary; they transcend the commonplace. His paintings sometimes seem to have been done at another time and place, a sort of remembering, yet they are of the present and future as well. They capture the spirit of all times, peoples, places, universal and timeless. March 28, 1948 - March 28, 2015