Claudia Rilling is a professional painter and educator based in Philadelphia.

She holds a BFA in painting from Boston University and studied at The Academy of Art University in San Francisco, obtaining her MFA.

Rilling spent many years as an adjunct professor in painting, at both the graduate and undergraduate level.

She has exhibited her work regularly for over a decade and her pieces are housed in private collections across the U.S. and Europe.

With a background in classical painting and drawing, she blends this foundation with a passion for contemporary art and ancient art history.

Drawing inspiration from her travels in Italy and the flora and fauna in her native Pennsylvania, her paintings explore a variety of subjects.

"For me, a little bit of variety in my process keeps me engaged. I am very engaged with masters - especially the flat shapes of the early Italian painters - Giotto, Piero Della Francesca, et al, to the loose marks and colors of Fairfield porter, I look to Morandi for stillness vs tension, and tones, and also many many other contemporary and older painters."

- Claudia Rilling

Lou Schellenberg

Lou Schellenberg is a visual artist who divides her year between painting in Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia, Canada. Raised in New York and New England, she has a deep connection to the northeastern coast. Her experiences of both rural and urban life have shaped her work and perspective. For more than thirty years, Schellenberg’s landscape paintings have combined observation and invention, creating pared-down compositions of dwellings, structures, and surrounding landscapes. After earning an MFA from SUNY Albany, she moved to Pennsylvania, where she taught as an Associate Professor of Art for 20 years.

Schellenberg has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and Canada. Her paintings and public commissions are included in numerous collections, including Penn Medicine, Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, and L.L.Bean in Maine. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; a solo exhibition with Lancaster Galleries; and two-person exhibitions with Kiesendahl + Calhoun in Hawley, Pennsylvania, and Cerulean Arts in Philadelphia.

"For this exhibition, I selected several oil paintings that reflect my experience of painting and living in two places:

Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia.

The works express my visual and emotional connection to older towns and clustered settlements."

- Lou Schellenberg

...I distill every element through three core pillars—colour, composition, and feeling—and use them to create a calm, ordered space for the viewer."

- Laura Vahlberg

Laura Vahlberg's work has been exhibited around the U.S. and internationally (Australia, Los Angeles, New York, Alabama, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Virginia). She has studied with artists including Israel Hershberg, Ken Kewley, Ken Szmagaj, and Susan Jane Walp.

She now lives in Roanoke, Virginia and received her Bachelors in Fine Arts at James Madison University. Her work can be seen in person at Reynold's Gallery (Richmond, VA) and Rhett Baruch Gallery (Los Angeles, CA).

Sophie C. White

Born 1984 in New York, NY, Sophie Cooper White has lived and worked in Philadelphia, PA since 2009. Since adolescence in a rapidly transforming NYC at the turn of the Millennium, she has made small, representational paintings from life of familiar places at various stages of becoming unfamiliar. Colorful paper mache sculptures and experimental sound and performance work sometimes accompany her paintings, mimicking the environment in which they were made and inviting the viewer into the work. Sophie’s paintings focus on the uncanny details of a neighborhood disfigured by over-development, from the perspective of a resident feeling a bit lost.

Sophie holds an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art. In 2025 she was the subject of a solo exhibit at the Philadelphia International Airport, participated in 11 group exhibitions in Philadelphia and New York, was a nominee for the Pew Fellowship and a recipient of the Illuminate the Arts Grant. She has exhibited consistently since 2006.

"In response to an extreme wave of development and displacement occurring in my Fishtown/Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, I’ve made over 100 plein-air gouache paintings of my local surroundings.

I’ve been painting cityscapes in this manner for over twenty years, ever since I learned to paint while experiencing similar feelings of alienation from my surroundings, growing up in Lower Manhattan at the turn of the Millennium.

This most recent series on display at Gross McCleaf Gallery shows the community green space that until recently, was next door to my home and studio in Fishtown.

Once a protected publicly accessible green space owned by a local non-profit, it has been sold to a developer to be made into luxury condos and large scale retail."

- Sophie C. White

Reisman admires Claudia Rilling's "deliberate way of organizing shapes and color." Attracted to rendering architecture and other man-made forms, Rilling prefers working from imperfect preparatory drawings and studies rather than from literal architectural copies.

Emphasizing shape and color notes, her painting process both breaks and highlights clear edges. Editing extraneous information lets what was originally most exciting about a place come forward.

Allowing herself to disregard accurate perspective, Rilling sights a few important angles that let the architecture feel right within the picture frame.

Loose paint handling, broken edges and lines make structural geometry feel alive. La Sera's shaped stillness and emergent clarity create calm, while energetic brushwork integrates vigorous composition with mysterious personal ease and freedom.

Laura Vahlberg's work is "minimal and reductive," to quote Reisman. Vahlberg describes her work as painting "simple shapes she sees in the world," a response to the visual overload of everyday life.

She summarizes individual parts of a scene and organizes them into an accessible, impactful design.

A quiet haze permeating the work dissolves forms that are clearly placed within a spatial format: slow-emerging intimacy comes from removing details. Hotel feels like a painting of overlapping auras, the brightly lit building in the background merges with a darker car in the foreground. The car becomes an observer, seeming to share what it sees with the viewer. The abstract design of the hotel and car create a pleasing interval of repetition and dissonance, inhabiting a sun-drenched world while signaling a vital, grounded, basic narrative.

Celia Reisman and the artists of Common Ground construct their paintings thoughtfully.

Each in her own way honors the tradition of observing and interpreting the subject of human structures in landscape.

All humans impose changes on their environment: these five artists not only make paintings of realistic places but works that leverage vastly different relationships to ideas about place. Investigating how we inhabit factual and imagined locales, the artists engage with, alter, remember, reframe and reorganize both their chosen subjects and their orientation to them.

Taken as a whole, both exhibits create an opportunity to absorb permissive conceptions of place, nudging everyone to experience the momentary flash, breadth, and depth of how being located exactly here feels so different for other people.

Common Ground will be on view at Gross McCleaf Gallery from September 18 through October 17, 2026. For additional information, images, or sales inquiries, please contact Gross McCleaf Gallery at 215.665.8138 or info@grossmccleaf.com.