In 1962 Paul Reed found his personal style. He abandoned the grid-based compositions done in 1961 and followed Louis and Noland in experimenting with the staining process, pouring diluted acrylic on unprimed, sized canvas. These paintings, based on drawings, have an all-over woven-together look created by the repetition of flat, curvilinear shapes in which two or three alternating colors are densely used for a contrasting composition that fills the canvas. The paintings soon became asymmetrical with large fields of bare canvas.

The asymmetrical woven canvases were exhibited in Paul Reed's first solo exhibition at the Adams-Morgan Gallery in January-February of 1963, along with new paintings oriented on the center of the canvas. In the centered paintings, begun in late 1962, Reed moved away from the all-over coverage of the whole surface of a painting that characterized Abstract Expressionism. The centered composition pieces had multiple colors and were loose in form through the effect of poured paint. Over the course of 1963, the shapes in Reed's centered compositions became more defined in their edges, suggesting organic forms organized by an underlying geometric structure. Art critic Barbara Rose described one of these works in her article "Primacy of Color" in Art International (May 1964) as quot checks  of color unfurling in Arp-like shapes." As the open-centered paintings evolved into studies of centrifugal motion, Reed created his first shaped canvas series, the Satellite paintings of 1963. These works were made up of a central large canvas with a smaller companion painting hovering alongside it. The Satellite paintings were exhibited at the East Hampton Gallery, New York in November of 1963 in a solo exhibition of twelve paintings and then several were shown in Reed's solo exhibition at Jefferson Place Gallery in January of 1964.