BY KEELIN EVERLY-LANG
Devin Lawrence Reynolds is a rare artist in Tacoma as a realist oil painter, and with his new studio in Courthouse Square, he’d like to change that.
“Artists shouldn’t have to go all the way to Seattle,” Reynolds said. He plans to start holding workshops to share the fine art techniques he learned during his three and a half years at an atelier in Venice.
“If you’re really good, I know I can make you better, and I know teaching them is going to make me better,” Reynolds said.
For the past six months, he’s been focused on creating a set of seven large-scale paintings that he is submitting to the international 2026 Almenara Art Prize in Spain.
Paintings that include several figures took up to 120 hours, while the single-figure paintings were closer to forty-five to sixty hours.
This does not include the figure studies, sketches, and even physical maquettes that he often creates as he plans a piece.
The paintings represent abstract concepts through human figures, creating allegories and stories to explore aspects of the modern human condition.
“The figure is not merely portrait or anatomy, but a vessel for inner life and universal experience. Rooted in classical draftsmanship and oil technique, the work draws from mythology, history, and lived emotion while speaking in a contemporary voice,” Reynolds says of his figure paintings.
The cover painting, titled “The Show,” for example, explores the expectations and masks we are forced to wear throughout our lives.
Behind the jester figure, “time stands patiently, marking the years we spend learning the difficult truth that a life fully shaped by the world is rarely a life fully lived,” Reynolds describes.
“Yet within each of us remains something untouched, a truer self waiting beneath all that has been placed upon us. There is hope in remembering that beneath every performance, beneath every expectation, beneath every borrowed identity … we are still ours to discover,” Reynolds continues.
“Perhaps the greatest act of courage is simply this: to become who you were before the world told you who to be.”
Other paintings in his recent series of seven explore topics like religious freedom, the heavy weight of time, AI, the constant noise of modern life that drowns out our inner inspiration, and the wild inner nature we lose when we lean too much into the comforts and ease of technology.
“All of this work is geared toward what we have and what we are losing,” Reynolds said, like a reminder to “embrace your wild side, embrace the things that are hard … all of life is lessons.”
His Muses painting is a reminder that “everything is given to us” and to “sit quietly and make something beautiful. They used to call it the muses. … These days, that inspiration is getting drowned out.”
This process of sitting quietly and letting the ideas come also reflects Reynolds’s process for coming up with the concepts for his pieces, which mostly come to him in the hour before waking in the morning.
“The application [of paint] is the craft, but the coming up with it, the concept, that’s really when the art happens,” Reynolds said.
He has always been a visual thinker and said as a young person he was “always in a teacher’s conference” and “terrible at math.”
“I was always in plays, I always asked questions, I was loud,” Reynolds said.
As he grew, he had a variety of careers, and he and his wife have taken time supporting each other financially as the other pursued higher education. When his turn came, he focused on learning the art and craft of oil painting.
Reynolds learned as much as he could about oil painting from instructors at Gage Academy of Arts in Seattle. Then a trusted teacher told him that, to get the most out of his talent, he needed to go learn from the masters in Italy.
In a class of twenty in Venice, he was the only one to graduate on time.
The experience was extremely challenging, Reynolds said. In addition to the rigor of the course, the COVID-19 pandemic hit while he was there.
His wife is a trauma physician assistant, and as he was studying in Italy, the pandemic was hitting both their communities.
“She would give me updates about what was going on. You know those freezer trucks they were renting in New York City for the bodies? That was happening here too, people just didn’t know,” Reynolds said.
Knowing his wife was going through this and seeing the impacts in Venice added more pressure to his determination to finish the program.
“It pushed me really hard because I felt like it’s all for nothing if I don’t graduate,” Reynolds said.
Despite the challenges, he made it through and said he is still learning every day.
After finishing these last seven pieces, Reynolds said, “I’m seven times better than when I did that first painting.”
When he is not entering international art competitions, Reynolds also has art in galleries around the country and accepts commissions.
Learn more about his art and stay tuned for more information about his workshops at devinlawrencereynolds.com/about-the-artist.
