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Gerald Hennesy

Gerald Hennesy, a native of Washington, D.C., attended the Corcoran School of Art on a scholarship. He began his art career as a newspaper artist, but after Naval duty during WW II and Korea, he began devoting himself exclusively to fine art painting. Since 1972 he has maintained his studio at the home he built on ten acres in Clifton, Virginia. In 1976 his son Paul, one of his six children, began painting with him in the studio and on frequent painting trips along the East Coast and in Europe. They are represented by some of the same commercial art galleries and have had frequent two-man gallery shows together.

Gerald believes that some part of his artistic talent derives from a family history in art, as his grandmother, father, uncle, sister and cousin were all artists. And the tradition continues with two of his sons who are working as artists and a grandson who is now taking college art courses.

Gerald paints primarily in oil in an impressionistic style, working both in plein-air and in his studio. It is important that a subject chosen for a painting be exciting to him, so it will then also be exciting and interesting to the viewers of his completed piece. Once a scene has been selected and the composition sketched in, Gerald paints rather rapidly, while attempting to achieve a freshness of color and expressiveness in his brushwork. He is particularly concerned with depicting the effect of light on his landscape and seascape subjects.

His work has been exhibited widely in commercial and museum galleries including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Georgia Museum of Art, The Corcoran Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Museum. His paintings are in numerous private, corporate and public collections, including the U. S. House of Representatives, the State Department, the Maryland State Mansion, the DAR Headquarters, and the American Legion Headquarters. He is listed in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in American Art.