Biography

Tom Scullin was born in 1953. He received his BFA from the Ohio State University and his MFA from Pennsylvania State University. Soon thereafter he attended the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting.

Tom is a proud Founder and a retired fulltime associate professor at Pennsylvania College of Art & Design in Lancaster, PA. He has had 39 years of fulltime college-level teaching experience. He thoroughly absorbed Art History from years of teaching it, and travelled extensively in Europe five different times.

Scullin has been a realist painter since his teens. Tom has had 16 one-person shows, including the Regitz Galley at the Ware Center in Lancaster, PA. Some of his other one-person shows have been in the Jun Gallery and the Hahnemann University Gallery, both in Philadelphia, PA.

Scullin has participated in over 60 group or juried shows. He has won four First prize painting awards as well having been exhibited four times in the prestigious Butler Art Museum in Youngstown, Ohio. Tom recently was honored with a one-person retrospective at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design in Lancaster, PA. His YouTube lecture is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hOwLXVu58c

Artist Statement

I have always explored a realism that has grandness and mystery. This is even evidenced in my still life paintings. All is an interaction of characters that etch themselves in time.

The spectacle of the American Southwest inspired me to explore that location for over a decade. Almost all of these paintings are in an oval format in order to capture a panorama of a complete visual field. Some of the paintings are executed on large-scale concave fiberglass forms that envelop the viewers visual field. My influences include Hockney's photography and Frederic Church. The process of erosion makes these forms nature's sculptures, much as Michangelo had to carve marble to discover the form.

Since that time, I have dealt with allegorical paintings in order to investigate themes of history, enigma, and morality. The earliest stage of this was the theme of the "The Sacred and The Profane". Next I dealt with tyrants in history. I wanted to deconstruct the concept of "allegorical paintings".

Now my subjects are a Hyper-Baroque mix of charged juxtapositions. The Baroque is my favorite historical era and I am updating it. The dynamism of exploitative exploration and the hysteria of religious intolerance are its hallmarks. Allegorical paintings should be infused with a contextual richness that extends across many categories of time, cultures, and morality.

To this end, I use very bright colors and supernatural effects on the beings and settings. My style is a unique combination of many influences: the savagery of Goya, the eroticism of Balthus, the perplexity of Magritte, the realms of science and pseudoscience, and religious art from many realms and eras. Most of the time, I will include animals in the picture, as humans make themselves too important. I believe that I am the only painter of allegories of this style and content.

I think my outlook was shaped from being one of nine children and having grown up Catholic.

I consider myself to be a hard worker who has always had something to say, as evidenced by my artistic output.

For commenting on or purchasing my art, please email me at tomscullin1@verizon.net .