ReeL studied art history with Rainer Crone, painting with Jacob Lawrence, Michael Spafford, Robert C. Jones, Michael Dailey, 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.
In the 70s and 80s, Reel wrote for Vanguard, ArtExpress, and High Performance art magazines, Artweek, had a weekly column for the Bellevue Journal-American daily newspaper, and was the arts editor for the Seattle Voice city magazine. Working closely with the and/or alternative space in Seattle, which was bringing in artists such as Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Bill Viola, and Martha Rosler, ReeL became one of the earliest writers writing about many of and/or’s guest artists.
During this time ReeL sat on two Seattle Arts Commission Special Task Forces: Media and Educational Institutions for the Arts. Reel was involved in performance art as well as writing and painting, performing in pieces presented at the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum Pavilion space, Cornish School for Allied Arts, Washington Hall, Poetry Seattle, Salon Apocalypse, and art galleries, such as the Polly Friedlander Gallery in Seattle's Pioneer Square, usually collaborating with musicians or dancers, while exhibiting regularly with the original Jackson Street Gallery located upstairs at 123 Jackson Street. ReeL also taught color theory, painting, life drawing, and art history at what is now Seattle Central College. One of ReeL's earliest successes was with Art in Transit, a pilot project putting original art on Metro buses, intentionally subverting commercial ad spaces with unannounced avant-garde art. This 1975 experiment was so highly regarded by the community it became the successful proof-of-concept eventually convincing Metro to fund and launch a multi-year, formalized version in 1982.
Leaving Seattle in 1984, ReeL dropped out of public life for a decade, for the most part not exhibiting or publishing during this time with the notable exception of a solo show of drawing at Seattle's Mazey Hickey Gallery in 1987.
ReeL’s early painting alternated between phases of figurative and more abstract imagery, for the most part ignoring the distinction between drawing and painting. The figurative work focused on issues of identity and sexuality, and sometimes his earlier concerns with what he calls ecological thinking. In 2009, ReeL stripped all references to the material world from his work as a critique of the hyper-materialism he felt pervades contemporary society. This has been interpreted as an extension of his ecological thinking.
In a presentation at the Morris Graves Museum of Art, art critic, Jae Carlsson [Art Dish, ArtForum] pointed out ReeL’s visual and philosophical connections to earlier Pacific Northwest painters such as Morris Graves and Mark Tobey [with personal connections to George Tsutakawa and Kenneth Callahan], while at the same time indicating that ReeL had pushed his work beyond any Postmodernist regime to the point it could be considered a critique of Postmodernism. A 2011 catalogue states::
ReeL's technique exhibits a high degree of transparency, layering, sfgraffito and graffitto, with a strong sense of hand, the hand-made, and an absence of any references to the material world. This work can be seen as a thorough-going critique of materialism, the machine or machine-made, and the triumph of feeling over the manufactured. For ReeL, marking is a defining characteristic of the human and the primordial act of signification and meaning for human consciousness. [Arconi, 2011]
In 2017, the following statement was published by a California writer regarding ReeL’s work:
Like an archaeologist uncovering the remnants of written language, ReeL creates meaning from, not just what is visible, but in what has been obscured. To understand ReeL’s work one must look at his attraction to such seemingly incongruent influences as erased whiteboards, blizzards, improvisational music, and abandoned industrial sites. His work celebrates the meaning in remnants, the hidden, the random and destroyed. [Heather Stobo, 2017]
Staying on the fringes of the art world, primarily in the western United States of America, ReeL has quietly built one of the most profound bodies of painted work in the world, freely exploring his own program without the restrictions of commercial or local constraints. Working with abstractions of abstractions of abstractions his recent schemas and topos paintings focus on ever deeper aspects of our cognitive processing.
ReeL’s work is collected world-wide, including 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, ReeL’s work has been exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Morris Graves Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Seattle Art Museum, Butler Institute of American Art, and in New York, South Korea, Japan, and Argentina. Born and raised in Seattle, ReeL is based in Portland, Oregon, with his spouse, Rhonda P. Hill, founder of EDGE Fashion Intelligence, an online platform promoting young designers with zero waste practices, high aesthetic standards, cultural diversity, and ecological integrity.