Reynolds belongs to the second generation of Taos painters, the artists who arrived after the founding members had established the colony's reputation, and who absorbed and extended that tradition into the mid-twentieth-century landscape painting of the American Southwest.
Reynolds came to art from outside the usual artistic channels. He grew up in Oklahoma at the moment the territory was becoming a state, was educated at two of its principal universities, and entered the workforce in the kind of clerical-financial roles that defined a great many ambitious young men of his region and generation. He served first as a bookkeeper, then as chief clerk to the treasurer of the Skelly Oil Company in Tulsa, and eventually as secretary-treasurer of an engineering firm. Painting began for him as a private discipline in 1925, undertaken alongside the business career that would support him for the next two decades.
His training as a painter was almost entirely self-directed. The brief periods he spent at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Académie Julian in Paris gave him exposure to formal academic practice, but the substance of his development came from sustained looking at the work of the Taos painters, including Oscar E. Berninghaus and Joseph Henry Sharp, two of the founding members of the original Taos Society of Artists, whose example shaped his approach to color, light, and subject.
The decisive engagement with New Mexico began in 1932, when he started making regular painting trips into the state from Tulsa. Over the next decade and a half, the rhythm of his life increasingly tilted away from the corporate offices in Oklahoma and toward the high desert. In 1946 he moved permanently to Taos, gave up the business career, and committed himself fully to painting. He soon opened a gallery there, where he sold his own work alongside that of other Southwestern artists.
His mature work centered on landscape, pueblos, and Native American figural subjects, painted in a realist idiom of warm tonal control and careful attention to the particular light and atmosphere of the Southwest. He exhibited continuously across the region during the postwar period, with one-man shows at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe (now the New Mexico Museum of Art), the two principal exhibition venues for serious painters in his geographic territory, alongside a long sequence of group and gallery presentations across Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
His position today is that of a respected regional painter whose life and career help illustrate the second generation of the Taos and Santa Fe colonies, artists who did not invent the local landscape tradition but who lived inside it, refined it, and passed it forward into the postwar period.