Every day after finishing his work at Boeing as a manufacturing engineer, Richard Reed drives from Everett back to his Mount Vernon home. He’s often tense from the commute, but once Reed enters his art studio and begins working with watercolors or acrylic paints, he quickly relaxes.
“My wife says I’m this completely different person when I leave the studio,” Reed says.
The 64-year-old has been a hobby painter for decades, but committed to it more seriously – and publicly – in the last few years. His subjects range from flowers and landscapes to classic cars and “Star Trek,” and his work has been featured in numerous regional art exhibitions.
And on most days, the combination of art and aerospace leaves Reed feeling extraordinarily fulfilled. “I tinkered with airplanes as a kid, and artwork, and it’s funny,” he says. “The very things I played with as a child I’m able to do for a living, and that, in itself, is a gift.”
Richard Reed Finds His Path to Art
Reed was born and raised in Grants Pass, Oregon. He credits his love of art to his parents, who encouraged him to enter an early drawing – of a boat leaving its harbor for the open ocean – in the Oregon State Fair when was 11. It won him a third place ribbon.
During Reed’s senior year of high school, he applied for a college scholarship tied to a new design for Oregon license plates. His image of a snowy Mount Hood and its famous Timberline Lodge didn’t win, but every time Reed sees an Oregon license plate, he recalls the project that truly inspired him to be an artist.
After graduating from high school, Reed took two watercolor classes – the only formal art courses he’d complete after finishing his secondary education. Entering early adulthood, Reed was unsure what his career path looked like, but hoped it would somehow involve the artistic skill he calls a, “God-given gift.”
Reed lived in both Astoria and Bend, Oregon, for a time, before a move to Renton, Washington, for his wife’s nursing education. While he’d intended to apply to the Art Institute of Seattle, a conversation with a friend convinced Reed to attend college for aerospace. A job at Boeing’s Renton facility followed in 1997.
With the exception of a several-year break in the early 2000s, Reed has remained at Boeing, helping bring to fruition projects like their 787 Dreamliner.
Skagit County Artist Sells Art at Events
About 11 years ago, and around the time he and his wife purchased a rustic home in the Mount Vernon area, a coworker encouraged Reed to submit his art for gallery shows.
He expressed skepticism. Like many artists, he says, he has often been his own worst critic about the quality of his work.
A subsequent painting, of orange bulbs from Skagit Valley’s Roozengaarde tulip gardens, won first place at a Stanwood-Camano Island gallery show. Reed also gained inspiration and confidence in his work from John Ebner, a longtime Puget Sound watercolor artist he met after joining the Camano Arts Association.
“He’s just been an avenue of resources,” Reed says of Ebner. “He showed me a path.”
In recent years, Reed has had his work juried at showings across Washington and Oregon, including the Keizer Art Festival in Keizer, Oregon (where he earned a people’s choice award for his painting of an iris flower) and Whidbey Island’s Coupeville Arts & Crafts Festival, among others.
Setting up art booths at festivals has also proved successful. At Kent Cornucopia Days, Reed made $3,000 in single-day sales. A humpback whale painting, for a show in Lynnwood, Washington about endangered species, was on display for mere minutes before being bought for $1,500, he says.
Reed is hoping to one day share his work at Seattle Comic-Con, being a longtime Trekkie with plans to expand to Marvel and Lord of the Rings-themed acrylic paintings, if given art booth approval. His ultimate dream is getting an art booth at the Lightbox Expo in Pasadena, California, where Pixar and Disney often recruit illustrators.
“I would love to be at home (one day), doing the next Disney movie – something that’s going to be big – and do a section of that,” Reed says. “So, when the credits play at the end of the movie, I can see the company that I’m contracting with and go, ‘I was part of that venture. I was part of helping make that movie.’ That would be the ultimate high.”
‘Follow Your Passion’ Says Skagit Artist
Besides his long-ago watercolor classes, Reed’s skill is largely self-taught.
He sometimes watches YouTube videos of other artists to learn and try various painting methods. His paintings – including those of flamingos glimpsed on a Florida honeymoon and various regional landscapes – are created from real-life photos he’s taken.
Reed plans to retire from Boeing in 2028, at which point he will focus solely on art. He wants to share it widely, he says, stirring people’s emotions and memories and, ultimately, creating a regional artistic legacy capable of outliving him.
Reed’s only regret, it seems, is having not started sooner.
“Go after your passion,” he says. “Not doing anything is the worst thing to do to yourself. I waited years…to actually take it seriously.”
