Penny Billings, CM

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.

At the Copley Society of Art in Boston, she has achieved the highest distinction of being named a Copley Master and has chaired both the Art Committee and the Membership Committee. In New York, Penny is a juried artist member of the storied Salmagundi Club and has been honored as a signature member of the American Artists Professional League. Penny is also a member of the National Oil & Acrylic Painters' Society and American Women Artists.

Her oil paintings have been recognized nationally and internationally in juried art competitions and 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, and the Massachusetts State House in Boston, as well as in commercial art galleries and in museum shows throughout the United States.

Penny's luminous paintings have been international finalists many times in the Art Renewal Center’s International ARC Salon and 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 as a juror for art competitions, and her own work has been juried into additional national competitions of the California Art Club, Allied Artists of America, the American Impressionist Society, American Women Artists, 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 grace and serenity of the contemporary American landscape.

They grace fine art collections in both traditional and contemporary spaces throughout the United States and internationally.

To see more of her work, or to request a commissioned painting, go to her website.

Selected Works