Mike Reagan 

Mike Reagan writes, “My studio in the mountains of North Carolina faces north toward the Tennessee and Virginia borders. My creative day starts after morning coffee and breakfast with my wife, Christine. Usually I begin by answering emails, returning calls, and then I turn to my atlases and reference maps to research the day’s assignment. The shelves and tables and floor in my studio are piled with old books, charts, maps—both old and new—animal bones, antlers, feathers, stones from rivers all over the world, and countless artifacts gathered from far away places. It seems to help me stay connected to the outdoors to have these things close by me. They seem to be my way of channeling the physical world into my studio; but after painting in my studio for days on end, I need to get out in the mountains and the rivers. Rivers are for me places of regeneration and a sense of rebirth. When I’m on a river I see the twists and turns in the stream’s course in my mind’s eye and I chart this automatically as a map. I absorb the light and tone of the water and the feels of the weather, the sounds; and take this feeling back to the studio with me. If my maps succeed, it is this feeling I want them to convey, the truth of place.

“My paintings have been influenced by the green islands of the South China Sea, Gauguin’s warm islands of the Pacific, Homer’s crystal blue islands of the Caribbean, Synge’s cold gray islands of the North Atlantic, Delacroix’s shimmering islands of the sands of North Africa, and my own mountains of the southern Appalachians that rise like islands above the misty valleys. The islands of the world have for me always been places of sanctuary, places of daydreams, places of refuge from the hectic world, and quiet places to contemplate the paint and read. I think of books as islands and I think of maps as islands of watercolors and in my mind, as I paint, they become nearly abstractions of these literal places. 

“I received my Master of Fine Arts in Painting degree from the University of Arkansas. My illustrations and maps and paintings have been shown in numerous museums, galleries, and universities, and have received awards from The Society of Illustrators and The Rockefeller Foundation, among others. My work has appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and many more.

“In doing my research for this map of Washington, D.C., I looked through my collections of old maps and atlases and I learned how rural the land around The White House was at the time of this map. It was much more farm land and woods than the city it has become since those early years. While I was working on this map I was reading the biography John Adams by David McCullough, which I enjoyed immensely, and came to understand our “founding fathers” at a much more human level.  Something Adams wrote in his journals in the year 1772 struck me: ‘Government is nothing more than the combined force of society, or the united power of the multitude, for the peace, order, safety, good and happiness of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved.’  In reading this book I especially came to admire John Adams’ ‘fierce integrity,’ but, above all, the very close relationship he had with his ‘dearest friend’ and wife, Abigail, party because it reminded me of my own wife whom I have called more than thirty years, ‘my little friend.’  We have four grown sons.

www.mapsbymikereagan.com