Paul Chidester

Biography

Paul Chidester trained in painting and drawing at the University of Colorado, Boulder (BFA, 1985) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 1988). He began exhibiting in Chicago, including a solo show, CORN, at the Chicago Cultural Center in 1991, and later taught for many years at Penn State's School of Visual Arts, where he is now Professor Emeritus in Studio Art. His paintings deal with landscape as a cultural construction: early projects included an allegorical prairie-grass museum in a disused Chicago firehouse, an illustrated Martian travel guide and a lunar calendar, while his paintings, often in tempera or Flashe, depict ordinary suburban and edge-of-town spaces in states of change.

A long connection with Ireland began with a Ballinglen Foundation fellowship in County Mayo in 1997, followed by awards from the Heinrich Boll Foundation and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, and two artist's books made with Helen O'Leary, Silage (2003) and New Potatoes (2005). He received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award in 2003 and has held residencies in Italy, Iceland and, in 2022, at Catwalk in Catskill, New York. In 2026 he exhibited in Unframed at Holland Tunnel Revisited in Newburgh, work drawn from three years of weekly group painting sessions, and discussed the show in a video interview with fellow participant Michelle Marozik.

Practice. Landscape painting in tempera and Flashe, developed from walks, photographs and drawings of urban edges, brownfields and suburban spaces; also artist's books and site-based interventions.