This high quality, giclee print of an oil painting by Joan Berkey. 8" x 10" 

Joan, a Cape May County resident, is an architectural historian with over 30 years of experience researching and writing about historic buildings, most of them in New Jersey. She is also a folk artist, an avocation she set aside while raising two children and having a full-time career working with historic buildings. With her children grown, she returned to her interest in American folk art. She has taken folk art lessons from her mother, Ruth Berkey, who was an Early American Decorator and a long-time member of the Historical Society of Early American Decoration. From her, she learned false-graining, primitive painting, tole, and theorem painting (stenciling on white cotton velvet or paper). She also took lessons in drawing and oil painting from several other instructors and focused on realistic paintings inspired by the American greats of John Singleton Copley and the Peale family. Berkey specializes in historic townscapes, which are oil paintings inspired by 19th-century black and white etchings of cities, towns, and villages.