Artist Al Gury lives and works in Philadelphia where he maintains a studio for portraiture, figure painting and still-life, and teaches painting and drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and The Museum of American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy. Gury's work has been exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and numerous other galleries and museums around the country. With special training in classic painting techniques and the methods of seventeenth through nineteenth century painting, he is frequently asked to lecture on the history and development of works from these periods and demonstrate their techniques. Education is a central focus in Gury’s career and extends to work with full time art students, graduate students, adult education and community education. He has designed and administered programs, presented lectures on art for museums, corporations and universities and been involved in community art education for groups ranging from youth at risk and special education for the homeless and aging to jurying exhibitions and writing about art. Gury’s painting incorporates a number of influences ranging from Medieval Icons to Baroque figure painting to Expressionism. The figure is a central subject and pleasure of the work. The intimacy and study involved in working with life models leads to their use in exploring powerful cultural images and stories like "Prodigal Son" and "Stories of Family Life". These themes provide a setting for a depiction of imagery from Gury’s personal history, questions and beliefs. The idea that "the soul stands naked before God at all times" is more than just a Renaissance justification for using nude figures in art, it is a belief that fuels Al Gury’s examination of his life through the tensions and pleasures surrounding the subject of the figure in painting. The intimacy of the figure in painting is carried into a second subject of the small still-life. Color mixing, qualities of light and shape, the spread of paint on oak and mahogany panels and the erotic qualities of flowers, like the nude figure, provide another range of formal and personal expression for the artist