Todd Camplin

I was born in South Bend, Indiana, and was raised in Kentucky. I am the son of a coal miner and a homemaker, and they encouraged me to go to college and seek my own way. I felt pressured to be a business major and to work with my hands, so I compromised by seeking a graphic design degree while taking as many painting and drawing classes as possible, I felt the need to get a philosophy minor. Although I worked under some Logical Positivist philosophy professors, I came out of the program with a more Existentialist worldview. Sartre and Camus were my main focus and my paintings and pastels were based on my emotional responses to my friends and surroundings. A Picasso and then a Matisse show at the High Museum in Atlanta were great influences on my early work.

I developed a romantic notion that art was about the pure expression of an artist's emotional response. But little things started to chip away at my romantic ideals through the exposure of Post-Modern philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. I also was exposed to artists like Allen Kaprow and Joseph Kosuth in the last contemporary art criticism class I took at Western Kentucky. Brent Oglesbee is the one professor at WKU who really pushed me to excel at making art...

2010 MFA in Drawing and Painting, University of North Texas 

2006 MA in Arts and Humanities, the University of Texas at Dallas

1998 BFA in Graphic Design, Western Kentucky University


Solo Exhibition
2019 Marshall Visual Art Center, Marshall, TX
2018 University of Maine at Presque Isle, ME
2015 Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas, TX

2013 Croft Gallery, Waco, TX

2013 Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY

2010 Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas, TX

2010 ‘Words, words, words...’ MFA Thesis Show, 500X, Dallas, TX

2009 Mod Shop Gallery, ink on paper and digital prints, Dallas, TX

2006 Neo-Portraits, Mitchell Loft Gallery, digital portraits, Dallas, TX

2006 Pigeon-Stone Project, Continental Gallery, digital portraits and ink on paper, Dallas, TX

2006 Signatures in Color and B&W, Janette Kennedy Gallery, digital portraits and oil paintings, Dallas, TX 2006 Faces, Austin Local Color Gallery, pastel on paper, Austin, TX

2003 Paintings and Pastels, Dawson Springs Museum, Dawson Springs, KY
 2002 A New Way of Seeing, Glema Marh Art Center, Madisonville, KY
 1999 Pastel Figures, Chamber of Commerce, Bowling Green, KY