Vincent Arcilesi's work reflects his two great passions: the human figure and the landscape. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he studied Bauhaus design, painting , and lithography as an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma, where he was trained as an abstract painter. His interest in figure painting was sparked by graduate school study with Louis R. Ritman at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While there he also fell under the spell of the great French Impressionist paintings in their collection.
He has painted figure compositions since 1964 and started painting landscapes on site in 1966. Over the years, the two strains have intermingled so many of his large paintings depict nude figures in various landscapes, mythic as well as real. He has had 29 solo shows, 22 of them in New York City.
In the summer of 2002 he exhibited six paintings in an international show curated by the renowned critic, Edward Lucie-Smith, at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Verona, Italy. In his most recent solo shows his sensual clothed and unclothed figures appear in the landscapes and cityscapes of Morocco, Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Russia, and Mexico City. In addition, he has had two solo retrospectives of his landscape paintings in 2004 and 2006. His work is represented in numerous private and public collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.