Featured Artist Reese Schroeder

Reese Schroeder transforms sound, structure, and emotion into richly layered digital paintings that invite viewers into immersive visual experiences. Learn more about the artist on his website.

 

 

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 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. 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.

 

Reese Schroeder invites you to follow on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.

 

 

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