"Self Portrait" Pastel & Oil on Canvas by James F. Penland

“There are no answers. There are only doors
to be opened. I never know what I'll be doing next.”

Founder of The Penland School of Art in Atlantic City, Atlantic City Fine Arts Center, and Ocean City Fine Arts Center, James F. Penland lived in Ocean City for many years before relocating to Glasstown in 2007.  With the “Family” of Casa do Felize de Artes, he established J.B. & M.E. Gallery in Millville’s Glasstown Arts District.  His art works are included in private and public collections around the world. 

Indicative of his diversity, his penchant for theatricality, and delight in off-center subject matter, the artist performed, when a young man in Florida, on the trombone with the Barnum & Bailey Circus Band – a milieu to which he returns, often, in his paintings.  The vividly imagined and self-sufficient universes of many of his works also show the influence of Mr. Penland’s activities in the American theatre.

“I am a visionary,” he says.  “The wellsprings of my art – whether figurative or abstract – lie in dreams, in reveries, in a lifetime of recollection.  Daubs of paint discovered on a palette – my own or some other artist’s … oily rainbows seen on rain-soaked streets … figures and forms glimpsed in clouds or on the sea or in a sudden memory – I seem to absorb them all into my deepest imagination, only to rediscover them long after in some painting I am doing.  I respond to my subject – a circus scene, a pot of flowers, a woman’s face – not only with a hand practiced in technique but with my entire being.  I resist all that would attempt to classify me as an artist: schools, academies, aesthetic theories, religions, and philosophies of art.  Instead, I insist on that perfect freedom of the imagination where magic combines with painterly technique to produce enchantment.”

And while Mr. Penland’s art has been shaped by uncommon experience including many year’s spent traveling through the most varied landscapes and cultures as a consultant for the United Nations, his art does not exclude the more familiar world of the streets.

“My art is nourished by the nearby as well as the outlandish,” he said.  “At 78 years of age, I remain wide open to life and life’s patterns.”