Ben Reeves grew up in Lynn Valley on the North Shore of Vancouver and currently resides in Tsawwassen, a suburb outside of the city. The culture and landscape of the West Coast has always been a powerful source of inspiration in his work. Reeves paints from memory rather than source material and depicts fragments of his daily experiences, often in dream-like palettes of blues, pinks and yellows. Reeves is best known for the physicality of his surfaces, applying large mounds of paint to represent snow or rain while making no attempt to disguise its material construction. More recently, Reeves has employed burlap in place of canvas and added elements of collage to advance his exploration into the relationship between an image and its making.
Ben Reeves was born in 1969. He is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver. He has exhibited his work extensively in Canada as well as in the United States, United Kingdom and China. In 2018, Reeves' survey exhibition, Floating Among Phantoms, was held at the Evergreen Cultural Centre in Coquitlam, British Columbia for which a catalogue was published. Other important exhibitions include The Painting Project: A Snapshot of Painting in Canada, Galerie de l'UQUAM, Montreal, 2013 and For the Record: Drawing Contemporary Life, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2003. Reeves' works are held in numerous collections including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.