The version of WPFolio that you are using, does not really work with Parent categories. It treats all categories the same, so that they all show up in the navigation bar.

WPFolio has been upgraded twice since your version and I think you will be able to do what you want with the new version.

Write if you have problems with the upgrade. Or need help.

I’ve seen this in almost all of the WPFolio sample sites, but oddly it doesn’t seem to be built into the theme.

1) for WPFolio category names MUST be only one word, e.g. Painting, not Recent Painting
2) for WPFolio each post can only have ONE category, e.g. Figurative Painting can only be in the Category called Painting, not in Painting and Figurative Painting
3) for WPFolio you should not create subCategories.
4) Posts contain “galleries”. WPFolio is pretty simple. I think you were making it more complicated than it should be. The basic structure is:
Category 1
-Post 1 with gallery of many pictures
-Post 2 with gallery of many picture
Category 2
-Post with gallery of many pictures
etc.

Or to do it with your set up.

Painting (a category)
-Figurative Painting (a Post with a gallery)
-Self Portraiture (a Post with a gallery)
-Other (a Post with a gallery)

Drawing (a category)
-Drawing (a Post with a gallery)

So you should add Posts, each with a gallery, to Printmaking and Cybergraphics.

5) If you name a Post “News” it will act like a blog where you can add multiple items of text and images.

6) Pages are for things like About The Artist, Contact and Home.
I added the contact stuff for your Contact page. Your Home page works fine. And so you just need to add a Bio to the About the Artist page.

Also I suggest from now on that you add one thing. Then test the site. If it works go on to the next thing. If it doesn’t work return to the previous state when it did work and try again. That way you will know when you have done something wrong and it will make it easier to fix. You have multiple mistakes in your set up before which made it harder to fix.

Good luck with the rest of the website.

I would like to change the thumbnail images that appear on the category “pages”.
For example, the sculpture-projects category page ( http://richardbecker.com/category/sculpture-projects ) use images that are not the best representation of that post.

Ive tried re-ordering images in the post, changing categories and changing “post thumbnail” with no luck.
Any advice?
Thanks!

2) 2009 is the yearly archive. Using the Widgets for Categories and Pages may get rid of the 2009 in the navbar. But if you are not using Widgets you will need to change a php file. Go to the “Editor” in “Appearance” and click on “header.php”. Find these three lines.

< ?php wp_list_categories('exclude=&title_li=' );?>

< ? php wp_get_archives('type=yearly'); ?> 

< ?php wp_list_pages('exclude=&title_li=' );?>

Comment out the line that gets the archive name. The middle line should look like this:

< ? /*php wp_get_archives('type=yearly');*/ ?>

Note the slash and star. You could just delete it but I like to keep the default files close to their original state. Frequently I add a comment saying that I have made the change.

And change the order of code for pages and categories, so “pages” is above “categories”, like this:

< ?php wp_list_pages('exclude=&title_li=' );?> 

< ?php wp_list_categories('exclude=&title_li=' );?>

Don’t forget to click “Update File”.

Please note that solution 1 and solution 2 are mutually exclusive.

If you need to order your categories, you might want to look at:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_categories
The default is that they are ordered by their creation date.

I have added some instructions for a Hack for Ordering Categories.