">DELMARVA SCHOOL OF ART

MEET THE ARTISTS

See the full interview for each artist featured in the book and some of their artwork.


A. Aubrey Bodine

Hear the story of A. Aubrey Bodine the celebrated photographer, whose daughter sells his work from her home in Denton. The late Baltimore Sun photographer never lived here but he spent a great deal of time here documenting watermen and the way of life on the Eastern Shore.

Allen Sklar

During the summer Allen Sklar can be found running a business renting bikes on Ocean City's Boardwalk. For a good part of the rest of the year you will find him on Assateague fishing and photographing the wild horses, resident eagles, and visiting raptors like peregrine falcons and snowy owls.

Aurelio Grisanty

Artist Aurelio Grisanty has built a successful business designing stylish crisp graphic Art Deco inspired travel posters. His equally beautiful fine art paintings are more expressionistic which employ an unusual creative process that leads to paintings which build on each previous work.

Barbara Warden

Milton Delaware artist, Barbara Warden, turned to drawing as her primary medium having previously concentrated on the fiber arts, specifically quilting. Her expressionistic drawings are rich with texture and movement.

Betsy Hall Harrison

Betsy Hall Harrison is a batik artist who lives in Ocean City, Maryland and works in her studio in Berlin, Maryland. Batik is a resist technique using fabric dyes, and hot wax on silk. The colors are applied in layers beginning with lighter hues and finishing with darker ones or black.

Bill Wright

Bill Wright is a science fiction and fantasy artist. He has a science background with a degree in biology which provides an eye for accuracy and plausibility in his life like compositions. His work has the beauty and power to inspire future exploration of this galaxy and beyond.

C Mercedes Walls

Milford artist C Mercedes Walls, also known as Cathy Walls, creates bright joyful paintings in a style that is both representational and expressionistic. She has discovered that some of the most enduring imagery is can be found in everyday experiences we can all relate to.

C. Keith Whitelock

Salisbury painter C. Keith Whitelock may be the quintessential traditional Eastern Shore artist. A master watercolorist, he captures imagery long associated with a life which seems to be fading away, which represent the life of Delmarva's watermen.

Dana Simson

Meet Dana Simson the owner of Chesapeake East Gallery. She is a Salisbury painter, potter, jewelry maker, and book author. Across all these mediums you can see Dana’s light-hearted style and sense of humor. She says she wants people to insert themselves into her art and interact with it.

Debra Howard

Debra Howard is an expressionist painter whose recent work was inspired by an artist's residency on Tangier Island. She takes just three colors red, yellow, and blue, to mix a myriad of hues that evoke the magical light she sees along our countryside.

Erick Sahler

Erick Sahler is a serigrapher. That is he creates prints using silkscreen. Erick’s original limited edition prints are clean stylish icons of uniquely Eastern Shore places, events, and culture. Lessons from an Eastern Shore art legend helped him get started.

Fred Sprock

Snow Hill painter Fred Sprock's creative interest initially was in pen and ink drawing. But taking oil painting classes convinced him that was his medium. His has an Impressionist style. But Fred says whatever it is it is a work in progress.

Geraldine McKeown

Geraldine McKeown is a painter who lives and works on picturesque farm in Fair Hill near historic Elkton, Maryland. Geraldine says art is a connection to the inner soul and that each painting is a direct response to a subject that has touched her emotionally. Geraldine finds that inspiration all around her.

Helene English

Helene English works from the reality she observes and then projects her own abstraction and stylization on to the subjects she paints which includes the tugboats that pass by her house on the Wicomico River, carousel animals, and humorous dog scenes.

Isabel Umanzor

For Isabel Umanzor, a native of Chile, music was an important part of her upbringing. Today, her creative expression comes in the form of both writing and performing music. She also creates paintings which are moody and expressionistic. She calls them “graphic dreaming”.

Jack Knight

Jack Knight is a prolific artist who paints large canvases with geometric shapes and patterns in brilliant sometimes neon colors with a style reminiscent of 1960’s pop art. He also makes sculptural assemblages from found objects painted with a similar approach.

Jan Kirsh

Jan Kirsh is a sculptor and landscape designer from Bozman, Maryland in Talbot County. She creates large voluptuous fruits and vegetables that have a great sense of sensual whimsy. Jan knows how to cast an enchanted spell with her work. She says fun is really important in the garden and in art.

Jason Giusti

Jason Giusti, a glass artist from Showell, Maryland, has a design sensibility based on simple elegant lines. Jason’s work is an alchemy between his knowledge, skill, and a sometimes-unpredictable collaborator: the fire.

Jim Adcock

Jim Adcock is an accomplished painter, cartoonist and caricature artist. His is most well known for his paintings of local towns and life at the beach. His work is a celebration of all that he sees, particularly that which can be found right here in Worcester County, Maryland.

John Iampieri

Bishopville artist John Iampieri is a screen painter. John's screens have a magical quality. They also reflect the deep cultural connection on Delmarva provided by all the people who have moved here from the Baltimore-Washington D.C. area.

Kirk McBride

Kirk McBride is inspired by those special moments when the light plays across the landscape - making magic. Kirk paints in an Impressionist style with brush strokes that flow with an easy casual grace.

Lesley McCaskill

Painter Lesley McCaskill moved to lower Delaware, after a long career as an art teacher in Bethesda Maryland. Lesley works primarily in watercolors. Her paintings are optimistic with a bright cheery color palette. These reflect her personality and her love for her surroundings.

Lillian Rippa

Smyrna artist Lillian Rippa is a master of Chinese Freestyle brush painting. Lillian practices her brushstrokes just about every day. She says that this discipline makes her more confident and actually gives her a sense of freedom in her work.

Lois Engberg

Salisbury native, Lois Engberg has found a way to bring together several things she loves: painting, antiques, and gardening. She creates classic oil paintings with elements of each of these things.

Lynne Lockhart

Lynne Lockhart is a native Eastern Shore artist who is known for impressionist paintings of landscapes, animals, and more. She creates masterful paintings with brush strokes that not only look effortless, but whose subjects look as if they could jump off the surface and come alive.

Maureen Bannon

Meet Stevensville artist Maureen Bannon who paints lovely landscapes in oils. She chooses quiet pastoral scenes that seem to have a story to tell: a boat yard, marsh grass poking through a fence, or a garden fountain and flowers in sunlight.

Maureen S. Farrell

Meet Maureen S. Farrell a Cambridge, Maryland artist who creates mixed media works. She takes an expressionistic approach to storytelling through collages depicting women walking singly or in groups.

Maurice Spector

Maurice Spector grew up on a dairy farm in Pennsylvania where he learned to love the land and working with his hands. Now he lives on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, on another farm creating timeless paintings, and unique sculptures.

Megan Burak

Using photo-realism, Berlin, Maryland painter Megan Burak explores ideas about things like privacy and relationships. Her goal with each composition is not to tell one specific story but leave the viewer wondering and imagining a story.


Michele Green

Plein air painter Michele Green's studio is the wide-open marshes of Somerset County, Maryland. Her daily year-round almost-all-weather discipline requires not only physical strength but tough tenacity.

Mike Quattrociocchi

Mike Quattrociocchi was introduced to woodworking at a very young age. When he was nine, his father and his uncles fixed up a barn for their use as a woodworking shop. They taught him the basics and he has been creating things ever since.

Monika Lilley

Monika Lilley is a fiber artist who runs the Upper Room studio in Berlin. She creates images of landscapes which invoke the wonder of nature. She calls fiber art a "made-from-scratch" art and she loves to introduce others to the joys of working in this medium.

Myrna McGrath

Myrna McGrath became a well-known and widely collected Eastern Shore artist with her prints of her hand drawn maps illustrated thematically with lighthouses, ducks, crabs, or other familiar symbols of Delmarva. Landscapes, flowers and birds populate her paintings.

Nancy Orme Mysak

Watercolor painter Nancy Mysak grew up on the Eastern Shore and continues to live and paint in Eden, Maryland. Her paintings celebrate the beauty of her surroundings. Nancy treats each piece as an experiment combining mercurial transparent washes with controlled detailed brushwork.

Nick Serratore

Pastel painter Nick Serratore is a founding member of the Milton Arts Guild and the Studios on Walnut, in Milton, Delaware. In addition to the usual landscapes and seascapes that one might expect for our region, Nick finds great inspiration in the wild meadows and woodlands here

Patrick Henry

Patrick Henry is perhaps the preeminent Impressionist painter from Worcester County. Patrick sees his work as a spiritual calling. He is prolific, painting a variety of subjects including rural Delmarva, and scenes from his travels.

Patti Backer

Patti Backer paints large eyed-creatures and fantastical scenes on wood, old furniture, and canvas. She describes her art as "a mix of folk and lowbrow… sweet and sinister." She is part of a new generation of folk artists bringing a touch of whimsy to the art world.

Paul Volker

Snow Hill artist Paul Volker has done thousands of satirical paintings showing various animals doing very human things. He uses unconventional materials to create his paintings and bas-reliefs: house paint and recycled paper pulp. Paul wants to challenge the viewer to think beyond the ordinary.

Rafael Reyes

Rafael Reyes, of Ocean Pines Maryland, creates paintings and inlaid wood bas reliefs. His works combine multiple images in a stylized kaleidoscopic effect. This abstraction and layering give the viewer an intriguing visual puzzle to sort out.

Ric Conn

Ric Conn is known for his realistic pastel paintings of birds but he has devoted most of his time recently to more expressionistic images depicting contemporary young women. Ric says his work is mostly realism, real objects drawn or painted to look like themselves.

Rich Smoker

Rich Smoker is a master waterfowl sculptor from Marion Station, Maryland. He has what many artists dream of: a life making art for a living. But, he's not in it for the money. What Rich wants people to see is a guy who loved his work, who loved going to his shop every day.

Rob Brownlee-Tomasso

Rob Brownlee-Tomasso is a painter who treats his subject matter to a graphic sensibility with black outlines, many layers and uncommon ingredients. He takes an unusual approach to his materials. For him it is all about breaking the usual conventions of art.

Scot Dolby

You might say that Scot Dolby is a fly fisher who paints. Or you could say that he is a painter who loves fly fishing. After a career as an elementary school teacher, Scot decided to take up both these endeavors full time. Scot is now known for his paintings of freshwater fish and landscapes.

Susan Holt

Susan Holt, of Salisbury, Maryland, breaks out from traditional art supplies to create thought provoking art installations, large three-dimensional works of art which are meant to be immersive interactive experiences for the viewer. Her creations take the viewer to unexpected places.

Susan Mayberry

Susan Mayberry is a Queenstown artist with an eclectic set of mediums. She makes her living primarily as a muralist. She also accepts commissions for faux finishes, and oil paintings. And she produces fine art crafts.