Robert Lucy is a painter and draftsman whose work spans more than thirty-five years and explores a wide range of representational genres — from portraiture and the nude to still life, landscape, and the self-portrait. A graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he earned both his BFA and MFA in painting, Lucy exhibited for many years with the Sonia Zaks Gallery, presenting three sold-out solo shows. His work is held in numerous distinguished private collections and in the permanent collections of The Marjorie Barrick Museum at UNLV and The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at The University of Chicago, where Sea Fashions, his suite of colored pencil drawings, was shown alongside works by Barbara Rossi and Robert Barnes.
Across his career, Lucy has created hundreds of paintings and drawings characterized by formal rigor and a deeply personal vision. For a decade, he painted en plein air along the Oregon coast, rendering the rugged landscape in oils. He has developed distinctive approaches to still life and figurative painting, and his colored pencil drawings — layered, translucent “spirit portraits” — reflect his fascination with the intersections of identity, energy, and perception. In 2008, he founded Robert Lucy Animals, a studio devoted to commissioned animal portraits; his portrait of Max, the Italian Spaniel, won Best in Show at the Museum of the Dog’s Annual Exhibition in 2019.
In New York, Lucy participated in the AIM (Artist in the Marketplace) Program at The Bronx Museum, exhibiting there in 2011 as part of the program’s 30th anniversary. His recent group exhibitions include FOUND: Queer Archaeology, Queer Abstraction (Leslie-Lohman Museum, 2017) and Arriving at Byrdcliffe 1902–2022 (Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, Woodstock, NY). In 2007, Lucy co-founded The Secret City — an Obie Award–winning secular church of art — with his husband, Chris Wells. The two relocated to the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in 2013, where they lived and worked for nine years. They continue to make their home in Woodstock, New York. Lucy’s first New York City solo exhibition will open on February 14, 2026, at the Kentler International Drawing Space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, featuring his recent colored pencil drawings.
