Frank Trefny was born in 1948 in Greenwich, Connecticut and has lived in Delaware for over 20 years. He received his B.F.A. from Syracuse University in 1970 and his M.F.A. from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in 1974. Trefny has participated in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions over the past twenty-five years across the United States, primarily in the Mid-Atlantic region.

His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Delaware Art Museum, the Noyes Museum, New Jersey, the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, and several additional museum venues. His work is represented in numerous major corporate and private collections. Trefny was the cover artist and the subject of a feature article in American Artist magazine in December 1987, and he was selected as the cover artist for Reader’s Digest in April 1995. Steven Scott Gallery has represented the artist since its opening in 1988 and mounted his sixth solo show of new paintings in 2007.

Philadelphia painter Scott Noel wrote in a catalog of Trefny’s works in 1994, “In their orchestration of objects, fabrics and flowers, Frank Trefny’s still life paintings evoke a world of harmonious, sensual richness. The pictures are lush and full, celebrating the pleasures of beautiful things and beautiful painting, but the images also summon complex, layered feelings, the joy of their painterly sensuality leavened with wit and melancholy.”

In Art in America magazine (May 1996), esteemed art critic and contributing editor Gerrit Henry writes, “Trefny is a master at turning realistic configurations into painterly abstractions, and his unusually large (for still life) canvases can be read over and over again for their many incidents of exalted painterly brushwork in his renderings of brocades, Chinese screens, pagoda tables, folded and open Oriental fans, homegrown vegetables, flower arrangements and spreads of brilliant silks. Trefny haunts antique and junk stores before spending days assembling his “rude objets” into a setup he can live with--and paint. The results are astonishingly beautiful canvases, presenting many vistas all at once.”

Henry, Gerrit, “Frank Trefny,” Art in America, May, 1996

Other Publications: Scott, William P., “Frank Trefny,” American Artist, December 1987.