Joe Allen (born 1955) is a British artist. He is known for a series of large-sized paintings on wood and for small portraits of artists.
Allen was born in Airdrie, Scotland. When attending school he took private lessons from C. M. Cameron, a Scottish painter of landscapes and also attended art classes at the Glasgow School of Art. He started his vocational education at St Martins School of Art in London and gained his degree as Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Fine Art at the Camberwell School of Art. Subsequently he gained the Master of Art Degree at the Royal Academy School in London.
In 1983 he started lecturing at Art Colleges in Newcastle and London, later he taught at the Centro de Arte Verrochio near Siena. From 1984 to 2007 he was a lecturer at the European Art Academy in Trier. He lives in London und Trier (Germany).
References to works from various periods in the history of art are to found in his paintings. They evoke reminiscences of Piero della Francesca, Velázquez, Titian or John Constable. Also an influence by impressionist painters such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet or Pissarro and masters van Gogh and Cézanne can be detected. Although he spent most of his adult life outside Scotland Allen can also be seen as standing in the tradition of the Glasgow Boys.
In 2007 Allen started a series of more than thirty small portraits of famous painters (and persons related to painters) among them Rembrandt, Delacroix, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Mark Rothko and David Hockney.
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