1. The Office of Institutional Advancement
  2. PAUL TIKKANEN: A RETROSPECTIVE Public Reception & Artist Talk

PAUL TIKKANEN: A RETROSPECTIVE| Event

Public Reception and Artist Talk

View the art and enjoy food and refreshments. Pieces will be available for purchase. This event is free and open to the public. Free, convenient parking is in the lot adjacent to Royce Hall, with the lot entrance on Gillett Street.

Paul Tikkanen was a contemporary abstract painter, sculptor, and photographer born in Ashtabula in 1926. He was a graduate of Ashtabula Harbor High School and the Cleveland Institute of Art. Tikkanen was a 1957 winner of the Cleveland Art Museum’s May Show for his painting “Chipped Crystal.” He married his wife Norma Stenberg Tikkanen in 1958; Norma was born in Saybrook, Ohio. Paul and Norma traveled extensively during their life together, visiting Mexico, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Paul studied, created, and showed art around the world, and worked in the United States as a draftsman, carpenter, boiler operator, sign painter, commercial artist, and portrait painter. He and Norma renovated the Old Ninevah School in Geneva, Ohio into an art studio, and he later established a studio on Lake Road. Paul was devoted to Norma, and was her primary caregiver at the end of her life.

Paul Tikkanen hoped to see visual arts flourish in our area, and wanted to encourage and promote both established and rising fine arts painters in Northeast Ohio and Northwest Pennsylvania. To help realize that goal, he left an endowment to the Ashtabula Arts Center Foundation. Fund from the endowment are funding this retrospective and opening reception at Lake Erie College.

The PAUL TIKKANEN: A RETROSPECTIVE runs from June 8 – August 1, 2023 at the B. K. Smith Gallery in Royce Hall for Fine and Performing Arts on the Lake Erie College campus in Painesville, Ohio. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. – 5 p.m., Monday – Friday.

Interested in purchasing one of Paul's pieces? Fill out the purchase link below to secure your art, please be sure to include the title of the work in the comment section.