Joshua Schaefer
Joshua earned his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and currently maintains a studio practice in the Philadelphia area. He works strictly from direct observation, attributing most of his education to time spent studying the Spanish and Dutch baroque masters, as well 19th century French painting.
Joshua's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States including the North Carolina Museum of Art and the aforementioned Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Painting, for him, is a meditative unraveling of both the intrapersonal and interpersonal, not seeking answers, but rather happening upon chance discoveries.
“I find myself returning to themes of life and death, often adopting imagery from my childhood. Sometimes this makes for unsettling, haunting images and others a preposterous, or even humorous, menagerie of once majestic, though now extinct, rulers of the world.”
