(Still Life With Fish)

Peter Paone

A very early Cubist inspired composition done while the Philadelphia-based artist was still in high school. In a note sent to the gallery upon reaching out to him about the painting, Paone responded:

"I was 17 at the time and Octavia [Locke] often bought work off the easel, but I did keep written records even at that time. I looked it up and I sold it for $11.00 which was a good sum of money for me in '54. I had an after school job at a fruit stand for $10.00 a week and always put any art sales towards buying art supplies and that day I must have been like a kid in a candy shop; now it costs me that in gas to get to one. Three years later I went to Paris for the first time and spent an afternoon with Georges Braque in his studio."

Octavia Capuzzi Waldo Locke was a Philadelphia and California-based writer, artist, educator, and collector. After studying painting, ceramics, and enamel arts at the Tyler School of Fine Art and the American Academy in Rome, she taught for several years in Washington D.C. She would also become a writer, authoring several short stories, esssays, and the book "A Cup of the Sun" in 1961.

Painter and printmaker Peter Paone was born in 1936 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An early interest and aptitude in visual art prompted his family to enroll him in painting courses offered by the Barnes Foundation - then located in in Merion, PA - from 1953-'54. He then enrolled at the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts), graduating with his BFA in 1958, and from 1966 to 1969 he studied miniature painting in London on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

While much of the modern American art world was focused nonrepresentational artworks during the height of Abstract Expressionism, Paone was interested in addressing the figure within that same genre along with several likeminded artists such as Cuevas, Orozco, Lebrun, Shahn, and Baskin. They contributed works to be highlighted in Selden Rodman's The Insiders: Rejection and Rediscovery of Man in the Arts of Our Time, (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press), a study of the re-emergence of the human figure in the modern art world, in 1960.

Paone has taught at Pratt Institute in New York, the National Academy of Design in New York, and since 1978 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In addition to the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship earned in 1965, Paone has received a number of grants and awards such as two Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grants, a Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Grant, A Mid- Atlantic Foundation grant, the first Print Club Award of Merit, and the 172nd Annual Painting Prize from the National Academy of Design.

His work has been featured in fifty-two solo exhibitions in New York, Houston, Fort Worth, Philadelphia, as well as in London, Vienna and Germany. Since 1960, he has participated in over sixty national and international group exhibitions. A selected list of public collections in which paintings, drawings and prints are represented include the Museum of Modern Art,NY; the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum, London England; the National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Academy of Design, Yale University Art Gallery, the Jersey City Museum, the Arkansas Art Center, the Woodmere Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.

Paone has been affiliated with the exhibitions committee of the National Academy of Design, the Visual Arts panel of The Pennsylvania Council for the Arts and is a board member of the Appraisers of Fine Arts Society and a member of The National Academy of Design.

His most recent one person museum exhibitions include, "Poets" in conjunction with his photography collection " The Artist Revealed" at the National Academy of Design, "The Italians" at The Jersey City Museum, "Imaginary Watercolors" at the James A. Michener Museum, "Creative Wellsprings" List Gallery - Swarthmore College in 2009, and "Wild Flowers" at the Woodmere Art Museum in 2013.