This is the official website for Erik ReeL, author of Pterodactyl Cries: Art, Abstraction, and Apocalypse, is a North American visual artist, writer, and philosopher whose work initially explored identity and sexuality, before maturing into his current work examining the cognitive processing of surfaces. The freedom and risk of improvisation is also central to his work.

ReeL studied art history with Rainer Crone, Robert C. Jones, Michael Dailey, Michael Spafford, Jacob Lawrence, color with Richard Dahn [a student of Albers at Yale], Chinese brush with Hsai Chen, and sumi-e with George Tsutakawa, taking a BA degree, summa cum laude from the University of Washington in 1975. Sumi-e, Japanese ink painting, was considered a foundational skill-set by the generation of Seattle painters that included George Tsutakawa, Paul Horiuchi, Mark Tobey, Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, and Morris Graves.

Erik ReeL has exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Morris Graves Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Butler Institute of American Art, and in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, South Korea, Japan, and Argentina. ReeL's work is in private collections based in Barcelona, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Dubai, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Houston, London, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Montreal, New York, Paris, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, and Seoul.

Born and raised in Seattle, ReeL is currently based in Portland, Oregon, with his spouse, Rhonda P. Hill, founder of EDGE Fashion Intelligence.