Chuck Ludwig Reina is a painter originally from Brooklyn, New York, where he first learned to draw by sketching strangers on the subway—capturing the raw, unguarded moments of life in motion. A self-taught artist for much of his early career, Chuck eventually headed west like so many restless Americans before him, seeking wide skies and a deeper artistic voice.

That journey led him to study under acclaimed fantasy painter Patrick J. Jones, whose mentorship pushed Chuck’s work to new technical and imaginative heights.

Now based in Marble Falls, Texas, where he resides in what he calls his “fortified compound,” Chuck paints scenes that merge American Western imagery with ancient mythology. He sees the American West as this country’s shared mythology—a landscape of legends, violence, and reinvention—and uses it as a stage to explore universal archetypes found across time and culture.

His current series, “Gods of the West,” fuses Greek myth with the stories, landscapes, and half-truths of Western history, reimagining centaurs as outlaws, gods as gunslingers, and oracles in desert towns no one’s heard of.

Chuck’s work sits at the intersection of folklore and fine art, where six-shooters echo thunderbolts and every dusty trail might lead to Olympus—or perdition.