Art Exhibit Season

My oil painting Still Life with Skull was awarded “Best Painting” in the 2025 juried exhibit of the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. The festival takes place every summer in the town that surrounds the campus of our Commonwealth’s university, casually known as Penn State. Just to have a painting chosen for this exhibit was nice. There were 346 submissions from artists across the state and only 47 pieces were chosen to be in the show. I will attempt to jury into this exhibit again in 2026 and defend my title!

Aside from the usual (and gratuitous) picture of myself with my work after the reception, my wife and I had a great time in the following days walking around State College and the beautiful Penn State campus taking pictures and enjoying the vibe of a university town, which was tangible even between semesters.

We also made sure to visit the fine drinking establishments situated just off campus, of which there are many.

At each stop we made sure to sample the beverages— purely for research purposes. The crowds were minimal so conversing with the bartenders was a big part of the fun.

More Exhibits:

Big thank yous to the thousands of, ... (OK five) people who visited my recent solo exhibit at the Elaine Biondi Gallery Space in Monroeville, PA.

Good thing I hauled enough pieces to hang there— the space was bigger than I expected. This overlapped with the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts juried exhibit, so I did something I don’t usually do, which is get a print on canvas made of my State College submission to include in my solo showing. Below is another cheesy gratuitous picture of myself and a couple installation views.

A few days ago I submitted 3 paintings to be shown in the Southwestern Pennsylvania Council for the Arts 30th annual exhibition. Hopefully they’re accepted. That takes place in the Galleries of The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art at Ligonier Valley, which is about an hour and a half away from my home studio. The opening reception is November 15th.

Holbein Biography Book:

The book I am currently enjoying is the biography of Hans Holbein which came out a couple years ago called The King’s Painter by Franny Moyle.

I didn’t fully consider and appreciate Holbein’s art until recent years. Aside from learning about Holbein’s process and techniques, the book did the one supremely important thing a biography needs to do when looking at a life and art from so long ago, and that thing is putting the subject and his work into the context of the their time.

Mrs. Moyle’s book also discusses visual clues in Holbein’s paintings that otherwise go unappreciated. Similar to Holbein’s life, his art had to mean different things and give different messages to different people in order to keep everyone happy. In those whacked out days of Luther’s reformation and Henry VIII’s megalomania if you couldn’t walk a fine line it could literally cost you your head. Holbein was able to flatter his sitters, yet give some of them the stick on the sly at the same time, if you know what I mean. Here’s your face. Take that you rotten so-and-so!

Lastly I have to take my hat off and hand it to authors like Mrs. Moyle who write books like this. When I stop and think about the amount of time, effort, and expense it must take to research so much of the obscure correspondence, documents, and images, that informs the writing— let alone weave an enjoyable narrative of a life from so long ago, where the known facts are thin to begin with— is quite an accomplishment. So big props to Franny!