Born in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Reece began his art career at the age of three under the eye of his mother, Gwyn Reece, and Ruth Shaw, who developed finger painting as both an art form and a psychoanalytic tool. Finger painting, along with other traditional techniques, gave way to a technique similar to frontage. By applying numerous layers of acrylic pigment to fibrous paper, he creates sub-paintings that are multihued and multidimensional. Some of these are more than twenty years in the making. Using traditional brush techniques, the process is continued by highlighting physical features--cliff faces, brushy gorges, river bottoms--that Reece finds in the sub-painting. Then come the characters--typically animals--whose on-canvas personalities and human traits provide an odd embrace of anthropomorphism. Between his early years as a finger-painter and his current work in painting and lithography, Reece studied art for two years at East Carolina University, then at the Universidad National in Costa Rica. He continued his education in San Francisco, earning a degree from that city's prestigious Art Institute. Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3