Gareth Reid (b.1974)

Sleeping Girl (2009)

Oil on board

32cm x 26cm

Courtesy of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland

https://garethreid.co.uk/

Gareth Reid is a Glasgow-based artist from Belfast. He has studied at the University of Ulster, the Glasgow School of Art, and the Florence Academy of Art. In addition to teaching portraiture and life drawing at the Centre for Lifelong Learning at Strathclyde University, Reid runs his own drawing classes in Glasgow.

He has undertaken numerous prestigious portrait commissions, and his work is held in many notable private and public collections around the world, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, Ralph Lauren, the Old Bailey, and the National Gallery of Ireland. His work has also been exhibited at the Wallace Collection, Royal Hibernian Academy and Royal Scottish Academy.

Reid has shown on five occasions at the BP Portrait Award exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in London, and in 2007 he won the BP Travel Award. Having travelled to Finland, he gave talks on his work in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh and the National Portrait Gallery, London. In 2017, Reid entered and won the Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year competition. As the winner, he was commissioned to paint the well-known television and radio presenter, Graham Norton, for the National Gallery of Ireland. The portrait now forms part of their permanent collection.

Reid tends to concentrate on portraits, figures and landscapes rendered with quiet, assured realism. This piece is one of his portraiture paintings and is representative of Reid's beautifully rendered and elegiac aesthetic, in its muted yet powerful influence upon the viewer. The work was created some years before his winning entry to the Sky Arts Portrait prize, but an understanding of the human form which has carried through his practice, can be seen.