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 of and a recently 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 has thoroughly absorbed Art History from years of teaching it, as well as having travelled extensively in Europe five different times.

Scullin has been a realist painter since his teens. Tom has had 16 one-person shows. Some of his one-person shows have been in the Jun Gallery and the Hahnemann University Gallery, both in Philadelphia, PA.  Tom recently was honored with a one-person retrospective at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design in Lancaster, PA in 2022.

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.

Artist Statement

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

The spectacle of the American Southwest inspired me to explore that locale for over a decade. Almost all of these paintings are in an oval format in order to capture the panorama of a complete visual field. Some of the paintings are executed on large-scale concave fiberglass shapes that envelop the viewer. My influences include Hockney's photography and the immersiveness of Frederic Church's large scale painting . The process of erosion makes many of these monuments visible and are nature's sculptures, much as Michangelo had to carve marble to reveal his figures.

Since that time, I have dealt with allegorical paintings in order to investigate themes of history, enigmas, and morality. The earliest stage of this was the theme of the "Sacred and the Profane" in which sometimes the aspects of both were interchangable. Then I covered monsterous historical figures and their tragic consequences. I wanted to deconstruct the concept of "allegorical paintings".  Sometimes these were tools of propagana for allowing mass-murdering, as seen in the social realism of Mao or Stalin.

Now my subjects are a Hyper-Baroque mix of puzzling juxtapositions. The Baroque is my favorite historical era and I am updating it. The dynamism of exploitation and the hysteria of religious intolerance are the  hallmarks of the Baroque, and this continues to the present day. 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 who has taken on this message.  Much of the architecture was made by tyrants, hence nature's destructiveness or fires are aspects of divine retribution.

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

I consider myself to be a hard and prolific worker who has always had something to say, and this should be evidenced by the extent of my artistic output.

I would appreciate you looking, commenting on, or perhaps purchasing my artwork.  

please email me at tomscullin1@verizon.net