Sandra Hoffman's art is part of many public and private collections including Bell Atlantic, Dupont, IBM, and Blue Cross of Pennsylvania. Hoffman attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as well as Tyler School of Art. She says that all things in nature inspire her, and she gets ideas for her paintings from her many travels and long walks in the local Philadelphia parks. Sandra Hoffman has taken home multiple prizes for her contributions to juried exhibitions, including the Watercolor Prize at Rutgers, and the Smith Emerson Award at the Woodmere Museum of Art.
The work of Gwen Gugell has been exhibited throughout the country, with many of her pieces shown in museums as well as public and private collections throughout North America. Originally a member of the distinguished Connecticut Valley school of painters, Gugell spent the majority of her professional life in Northampton, San Francisco and Oregon. Gugell's use of perceived form and texture elicits emotions in a manner that is not always obvious. Her work is well known for their palpable renditions of still life and figurative work while skillfully using form and texture to blur the distinctions between reality and fantasy. Color is the dominant factor, and the viewer is drawn into a glorious, luminous, and truly sensual experience. Gugell currently is represented by the B. Deemer Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky and the Chestnut Hill Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Stephen Takats began painting a few years before he retired from Temple University in 1995. He received instruction in oil painting from
Stuart Shils and also took courses at Fleisher and PAFA. Many of his cityscapes show the area near the Temple campus in North Philadelphia. He says of his work, 'My most satisfying paintings seem to combine some architectural geometry with natural disorder. When I'm out painting on the street, people sometimes come up to me and ask why I'm painting a particular scene. I don't know. I choose the scene because it has some mysterious combination of form, color and light that I like. I feel compelled to paint it. Of course, that doesn't always work, and I may repeat something many times to produce what I thought I saw. I find there are no rules that guarantee a good painting.
Colleen Joy is a Philadelphia-based artist and art educator. She studied fine arts at Ramapo College of New Jersey's School of Contemporary Art, and went on to study painting at the University of New Mexico's Graduate School of Painting. While based in Albuquerque, she traversed the American Southwest, internalizing cross-cultural experiences, geography, sky, and light, the building blocks for her work for the coming decades. Returning to the Northeast, Joy joined the Fine Art Faculty at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, where she has taught for more than a decade.