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Reese Schroeder

2D & Digital

Reese Schroeder

New to Spring 2025!

Rancho Mirage, CA

Booth 330

Featured Artist

My creative journey began at an early age, growing up in a deeply musical family. My mother was a professor of voice and opera, and my father was a professor of music theory and composition who chaired the music theory department at his college. From 1968 to 1977, I attended Interlochen National Music Camp, studying art, theater, and music. There, I developed an understanding of composition through layered structure, rhythm, phrasing, and emotional timing, while also discovering the power of color, illusion, and visual relationships.

 

My love of drawing ultimately led me to architecture, which I pursued alongside art, furniture design, film, and cartography in college. I later practiced architecture for thirty-three years across eight states with several Boston firms, designing projects ranging from historic restorations and high-rise buildings to industrial and residential structures. What fascinated me most was the interconnected relationship between systems, surfaces, planes, infrastructure, and light—complex visual networks working together with purpose and rhythm.

 

Outside of architecture, I began experimenting in 1988 with computers as an artistic medium. Influenced by the experimental electronic music my father composed, I was drawn to the precision and layered possibilities of digital creation. Working digitally allowed me to construct imagery much like musical composition: building, shifting, inverting, layering, and restructuring visual elements while remaining open to discovery and spontaneity. Each work is developed from a blank digital canvas through a highly controlled process of composition, layering, and visual orchestration. Works often come together as hundreds of individual layers, like visual voices. IN 1998 my artworks were recognized by the University of Texas at Dallas where I gave a dedicatory talk for the opening of their New Media lab.

 

As a visualist, I create immersive works that intuitively translate sound, structure, and emotion into visual form. I experience music as color, pattern, light, and movement. Structure arrives to me as frequency—expressed through harmony, dissonance, distortion, and balance. I see music and I hear color. My work explores the relationship between technology and emotion, combining conceptual abstraction with visual metaphor. I am inspired equally by the natural world and the unseen emotional structures beneath it. Inspired by both observed and imagined environments, my paintings seek to transform intangible experience into layered visual narratives.

 

My work aligns with the international movement known as Techspressionism, and I am included in The Techspressionist Visual Artist Index alongside artists from more than forty-five countries. My work has been exhibited nationally through galleries, juried exhibitions, and major art festivals.

What does color sound like? What rhythm emerges when geometric forms are layered like instruments in an orchestra?

 

These questions drive my digital paintings. While traditional mediums dominate gallery walls, I have deliberatelychosen to work digitally—precisely because the medium demands a discipline often misunderstood in abstractpractice. Digital painting requires intentional, architectural creation: a systematic building of layers where color theoryand form theory converge, much like composing music.

 

My practice challenges the accepted notion that abstract art emerges through spontaneous gesture—the idea thatemotional authenticity requires capturing a momentary impulse between artist and canvas. Instead, I treat the digitalspace as a compositional field. Each element functions as a voice within an ensemble. I build methodically:positioning forms, testing color relationships, studying how each layer advances or recedes against another, listeningto the visual "sounds" created through their interaction. It is a disciplined, intentional work.

 

Yet within this structured practice lies genuine discovery. As layers accumulate and interact, unexpected harmoniesemerge. Colors delight in their relationships. Forms develop dialogues with one another. The digital medium's capacityfor real-time iteration allows me to move, adjust, and listen to these conversations as they unfold—a fluid conversationbetween predetermined vision and material contingency. Spontaneity and serendipity arise not as breaks fromintention, but as emergent properties of the layering process itself.

 

The resulting works are visual compositions that resist reduction to single meanings. They ask for sustained attentionand they reward close looking. They allow viewers to engage not just optically but temporally—to move through thework as one might move through a musical piece, experiencing how each formal and chromatic decision buildstoward a larger resonance.

 

I invite you to enter this space and discover what Digital Paintings reveal.

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ENCORE 2026   |  November 12-15, 2026

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