Doel REED (born May 21, 1894, near Logansport, Indiana–died September 30, 1985, Taos, New Mexico) early evinced a predilection for art that drew him to attend Saturday drawing workshops at the John Heron Art Museum during grade school and impelled him in 1916 to attend the Art Academy of Cincinnati, from which he was graduated in 1920 after an interlude of military service. It was during his return to civilian life that Reed imbibed an ardor for printmaking, but because his classical education gave no instruction in the graphic arts, it was chiefly by self study that Reed became proficient in that art form. In 1924 he removed to Stillwater, Oklahoma, where he assumed the first professorship in art at what is now Oklahoma State University. Teaching became a vital part of Reed’s practice, and his novel curricular emphasis upon the graphic arts as well as his technical mastery drew considerable attention from around the country. His marked capacity as a printmaker and landscape artist gained him much international esteem (he was panegyrized as a master of aquatint), and international sabbaticals brought the artist into acquaintance with new locales and novel trends in modern art while also making him sensible of the advantages of his splendid isolation. Notably, it was by this means that Reed was formally introduced to northern New Mexico—to which he found himself inexorably drawn and to which he relocated permanently upon his retirement in 1959, settling in Talpa. His conservative aesthetic rendering him averse to the newly regnant paradigm of abstract expressionism, Reed quickly established himself as a leading figure in the Taos art colony and positioned himself as a regionalist. Notably eschewing the native exoticism favored by his peers in favor of the natural and altered landscapes around him, Reed readily adapted the austere grandeur of the region to his artistic vision—seeking to convey mood and sense of place by means of chiaroscuro, abstraction, and introducing disruption into his compositions. The ‘soft surrealism’ of his aquatints ensured him a continued relevance vis-à-vis the avant-garde even as his manner of painting—celebrated in former decades for its innovation—was considered démodé. Following his death in 1985, the wider corpus of Reed’s work has been thrown into new relief, and the mystery and magic that pervades his paintings has impressed itself with great force upon 21st-century audiences. Reed's work is held in the collections of the Carnegie Institute, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, and La Biblioteque Nationale, among others.