Brian Rego & Pierce Scantlin

Pierce Scantlin is from Alexandria, Virginia. He attended the Savannah College of Art and Design (BFA) and The New York Academy of Art and currently resides and paints in Frederick, Maryland with his wife, 2 children, 2 Cavalier King Charles spaniels, and 2 parakeets.

I am inspired by figurative exploration through deliberate archetypical retrospective styles and the evolution of abstracted and literal representation of the human form. 

I search for essential idealized forms and relationships, obscuring the lines between invention and observation using nature as a guide while working independently from it.  I try to create visual poetry to shroud lines of formality, and soften the edges between what I see and what I contrive. 

Brian Rego was born in Santa Clara, CA in 1980. He received his BFA in Painting at the University of South Carolina in 2004, and was the recipient of the Ed Yaghjian Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Work. He received his MFA in Painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2007, and shortly afterward, co-founded the painting collective known as Perceptual Painters. In 2022, Rego had his worked published in the book Art in the Making, Essays by Artists About What They Do, by the Fisher Press; and this year, Rego has been awarded the Blackwell Prize in Painting from the University of West Georgia.

Within the last fifteen years, Rego has taught at multiple institutions including the University of South Carolina, the University of Mississippi, the College of William and Mary, the Jerusalem Studio School, Art New England, Beverly Street Studio School, and Mt. Gretna School of Art. In 2015, he co-founded the Midlands School of Art, which offered training in visual perception and the classical use of materials to a dynamic range of students. Currently, Rego teaches online and works with painters from all over the world. 

In his work, Rego combines imagination and memory with the sense of sight and components from the observable world to make his paintings. As he works directly from life and in the studio, his paintings result in the accumulation of personal experience and narrative that embody themselves as symbols of his interior world. 

Rego exhibits nationally, and has work in personal collections all across the United States, in Canada, Germany, and Australia. He is represented by Nancy Margolis Gallery, and currently lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife and four children.