Edward J. (Ted) Reed | Classical Realism painter

Edward J. (Ted) Reed lives in Vienna, Virginia, with his wife and two daughters. He paints in his home studio and teaches portrait, figure and still-life painting at The Art League School located in The Torpedo Factory in Alexandria -Virginia.

Ted grew up in an artistic family and studied the basics of art in college, but did not complete his art education or begin painting in earnest until his late 30's. In the eight years since then, he has won numerous international and national awards*.

Art critics herald him as one of the supreme masters of the technical aspects of classical realism, the contemporary Vermeer, and an artist who steals a little bit of the soul and presence of the model and embeds it in the oil and medium and visual weight of the work.

Ted received his A.B., summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1986 from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He majored in English Literature and minored in Studio Art.

He won numerous awards🎨 for academic excellence, literature and creative writing.

Ted devoted much of his time during college to drawing, etching, and painting the countryside and people of coastal Maine.

Ted graduated from Harvard Law School with his J.D., cum laude, in 1989. Ted stopped painting during his law school years in the misguided belief that the demands of a legal education required him to forego all distractions.

For the next ten years, Ted practiced civil litigation for two top-flight law firms in Washington, D.C. He devoted half of his professional time to commercial litigation and the other half to plaintiff-side civil rights lawsuits. Throughout this decade, he rarely lifted a paintbrush.

Ted became disabled with a permanent, chronic pain condition and was forced to retire from legal practice at the end of 2000.

• Return to Art

Fear that his disability would steal art from him too kept Ted from trying to paint again until the end of 2001. His uplifting discovery that he could could paint felt like a second chance. He plunged back into his art education and has been painting in earnest ever since.

Over the next few years, Ted took classes at The Art League in Alexandria, Virginia. In 2003, he began teaching there intermittently. In the fall of 2004, Ted joined the faculty.