About the Artist
Penny Billings works in a unique style of contemporary realism. Painting from her imagination, memories or plein air field sketches, Penny's award-winning tonalist oil paintings capture the constantly shifting light and mood of today’s varied American landscape.
In New York, Penny has been honored as both a Signature member of the American Artists Professional League and as a juried artist member of the storied Salmagundi Club. In Boston, she has achieved the highest distinction bestowed on an artist by the Copley Society of Art for her paintings, that of Copley Master, has been elected to serve on its Board of Governors, and has chaired both its Art Committee and its Membership Committee. Penny was selected an artist Fellow by the historic St. Botolph Club in Boston's Back Bay, where she currently serves on its Art Committee. She is a Signature member of American Women Artists, a juried artist member of Cape Ann's Rockport Art Association, and an artist member of the National Oil & Acrylic Painters' Society.
Her oil paintings have won numerous awards in national and international juried competitions. They have been recognized in prestigious art exhibitions, in museums and in many commercial art gallery installations, where they have exhibited in solo and group shows - including exhibitions at the National Arts Club and the Salmagundi Club in New York, at the Boston International Fine Art Show, the Copley Society of Art, the Guild of Boston Artists, the St. Botolph Club, and the Massachusetts State House in Boston, and in museum and other art venues across the United States.
Penny's luminous paintings have been international finalists many times in the Art Renewal Center’s International ARC Salon and in The Artist’s Magazine’s Annual Art Competition. Her work received the highest award for landscape oil painting in the American Artists Professional League’s 85th Grand National Exhibition in New York, and additional awards in its 87th, 89th & 92nd Grand National Exhibitions. Penny has also won national prizes in the Audubon Artists’ National Exhibition, in the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club at the National Arts Club in New York, in exhibitions at the Copley Society of Art in Boston, and in the Academic Artists Association’s National Exhibition of Contemporary Realism in Art.
Penny serves regularly as a juror for art competitions, and her own work has been juried into additional major competitions of American Women Artists, the National Oil & Acrylic Painters' Society, the Hudson Valley Art Association, Allied Artists of America, the American Impressionist Society, the California Art Club, and the Salmagundi Club, among others. Her paintings have been selected several times for the Salon International, a project of the International Museum of Contemporary Masters in Texas, and for the international Laumeister Fine Art Competition at The Bennington Center for the Arts in Vermont.
Inspired by the American Tonalist master painters who idealized the 19th century countryside and the Barbizon School artists in Europe, and created using the best archival materials, Penny’s atmospheric oil paintings celebrate the beauty and serenity of the contemporary American landscape.
They grace personal and corporate fine art collections in both traditional and contemporary spaces throughout the United States and internationally.
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