About The Artist

Born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Cees Penning is a self-taught photo-realistic painter. Cees (pronounced "Case") began drawing and painting when he was in Kindergarten. Initially, his paintings were watercolors. Fascinated by realism, he was first attracted to a career in Graphic Design. He graduated fron the Graphic Academy in Amsterdam in the mid "60's, and worked as a transparency- retoucher in The Netherlands and Germany until 1974 when he moved to New York. Once in the United States, he established a successful enterprise in the very precise and demanding field of color transparency-retouching. Twenty years later, in the mid '90's, digital retouching completely started to take over the hand retouching. He decided to leave the retouching business, to take-up oil painting, which medium was completely new for him. He has been creating portraits, nudes, exotic animals, still-life and floral since 2000. A distinctive hallmark of his personal style is his ability to understand so well colors and execute a high degree of contrast between light and dark- a rare skill refined through decades of photo color transparency-retouching.