Paul Hennesy was born in 1954 in Rhode Island and now lives
and works in the family home located on ten acres a mile
north of the historic town of Clifton, Virginia. He worked
as an apprentice to his father, artist Gerald Hennesy, while
he studied at the University of Virginia and George Mason
University, from which he was graduated with a degree in
Fine Art in 1977. Since then he has devoted his full time to
the practice of fine art, working along side his father in
their home studio, specializing in landscapes and seascapes
in oil and watercolor.
Paul particularly admires the work of the French Barbizon
School painters and the American Realists and study of their
work has had a strong influence on his own style, wherein he
attempts to capture certain effects of light and atmosphere
on the landscape. His palette is naturalistic and his
brushwork ranges from tightly realistic to energetic and
painterly, depending on the mood and subject at hand.
Paul began learning the art of landscape painting by
rendering the more elemental motifs of sky, sea and sand
along the Outer Banks of North Carolina where his family
vacationed in the summer, and he still enjoys painting
seascapes. He and his father frequently travel to Europe to
study the masters firsthand in the great museums and search
for their own subjects to paint in the cities, villages and
countryside of France and Italy. Paul also finds a
never-ending source of landscape painting subjects in the
nearby rolling piedmont and Blue Ridge Mountains just to the
west of his studio, where he particularly enjoys painting
the few short weeks of high color in autumn and the delicate
pastels of blossoms in the springtime.
Paul is an associate member of Oil Painters of America and
was a member and past president of The Washington Society of
Landscape Painters. He has had a number of one-man gallery
shows and many two-man shows with his father. He exhibits
widely in galleries along the East Coast and his work is in
numerous private collections. Paul also gives private art
instruction to groups and individuals.
|