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Around
1950, the obscure
Boston
painter R. H. Ives Gammell began to acquire a few students.
He set them up in a room at the Fenway Studios in Boston,
where his own studio was located, and began to instruct them
in an old, neglected tradition of painting. Gammell was by
this time middle-aged. Strong willed, opinionated, and
extremely knowledgeable about the art of painting—he had
just written and published Twilight of Painting—he
was one of the few people alive in America to not only have
first hand knowledge of painting directly from some of it’s
most skilled practitioners but also to have personally known
those painters and their art world. The artists were known
as “The Boston Painters”: William Paxton, Edmund Tarbell,
Frank Benson, Joseph DeCamp, and others. Their art world was
pre-World War I.
The
students Gammell took on were a handful of talented
youngsters who has been seeking in vain for traditional art
training, for it was virtually absent in America—this was,
after all, the dawn of Abstract Expressionism. First, there
was the late Robert Cummings, and later, Robert Douglas
Hunter, Richard Lack and Robert Cormier. Through Gammell and
these young men, his earliest students, a tradition of
painting skills passing from teacher to students could be
traced all the way back to the French Neo-Classicist Jacques
Louis David. And through these few men that tradition was
preserved during the middle years of the twentieth century,
a time when there was not only little interest in this
tradition but active hostility toward it. This tradition of
teaching established Western art techniques is literally
handed down orally and by means of demonstration from
teacher to student. Gammell received his training from
William Paxton, a Boston painter of superbly crafted
portraits and interiors. Paxton had studied with the
American, Dennis Miller Bunker (a friend of John Sargeant
and a student of both William Merrit Chase and the great
orientalist, Jean Leon Gerome) and then went on to Paris to
study with Gerome himself. Gerome received his training from
the history painter Paul Delaroche, and Delaroche received
his directly from David, whose aesthetics were founded in
love of classical antiquity, both in admiration of such
masters as Nicolas Poussin and in reaction to the excesses
of Rococo Mannerism.
This kind
of teaching had become known as “the Atelier system” or as
“Atelier-type training” (atelier being the French
word for “studio” or“ workshop”) because of its roots in
nineteenth-century Paris ateliers. In America it came
through Gammell, or, as it was later standardized, by
Richard Lack. This training is characterized by a one-on-one
student-teacher relationship. In an atelier or studio
school, one or two teachers have complete responsibility for
a small number of students, and they personality guide them
over a period of years through a curricula designed to
facilitate the sound observation of nature and the
fundamentals of the crafts of drawing and painting. The
essence of this type of teaching occurs between the student
and the teacher, as the teacher continually and
constructively critiques the student’s work. Much of the
knowledge contained in this tradition has been and is being
written down, but the essential teaching is only really
meaningful in the context of the on-site, at-the-moment
personal critique.
Richard
Lack, who founded Atelier Lack in Minneapolis in 1969, said:
“The main concept, the seeing part, as I kept saying while I
was teaching, comes from Paxton via Gammell. Gammell was
teaching in the way that Paxton painted. Getting the note,
lost and found edges, warm and cools, scumbling out an area
and painting broadly—these are all things that Paxton worked
for.” One of Lack’s primary reasons for opening his school
was a feeling of obligation that he held about passing his
knowledge on to younger talents in order to keep the
tradition alive. Today, there are about a dozen ateliers
being run by former students of R.H. Ives Gammell or Richard
Lack, some of whose owners studied with both.
The
present ateliers and studio schools—descendants of Lack and
Gammell—do not represent a monolithic movement. They vary
widely in their emphasis and approaches to teaching, and
because they are all small, they are highly influenced by
the personalities and examples provided by their
instructors. They do, however, have much in common: they all
are dedicated to teaching the student to “see” correctly.
They put the study of the nude at the core of the curricula
on the premise that it amounts to a kind of encyclopedia of
nature. The demands that the rendering of the nude make on
the eye, hand, and brain of the student cultivate the skills
necessary for representational mastery over all other
subject matter. Drawing skills are emphasized first and
foremost. Beginning students work in charcoal or pencil or
both—pencil for shorter studies (a few hours) emphasizing
shape, and charcoal for extended studies, emphasizing value
(several weeks). The extended drawing study then gives way
to painted studies for advanced students, sometimes in
monochrome (grisaille) to facilitate basic mastery of paint
handling and modeling. Once this step is mastered the
problem of color is undertaken, in pastel or oil.
Beginning
students execute carefully studied charcoal drawings of
plaster cast that are illuminated by a single light source.
This provides a perfectly-controlled situation for the study
of form and value because the cast, unlike a live model,
never varies in shape or gesture; therefore, the study of it
is the most sound and fundamental way of training the eye to
perceive shapes and gradations of value. The lessons learned
at this level build technical skills as well as
psychological confidence, and both are transferable to all
other pursuits, especially drawing from life. In addition,
beginning students often do copies from plates and master
drawings. In many ateliers students will proceed from cast
drawing to cast painting in grisaille, again to gain an
understanding of manipulating oil on canvas. After cast work
is completed, students move on to doing head studies, first
in charcoal and later in pastel and oil. Also taken up is
still life painting (especially for the study of color and
elemental design) and landscape sketching. Advanced students
will often undertake projects combining still life,
portraiture, and figure work in an interior composition, or
a landscape with figures, as a way of developing their
design sense and skills.
All of
these studies are undertaken using the “sight size” method,
which involves the use of a plumb line for taking
measurements from a fixed point of view. Since its proper
use makes it much more difficult to commit errors of
proportion, this is a useful technique for any artist, but
as a teaching tool it is superlative. Because student and
teacher both view the subject from the same point of view
using the plumb line as a device to compare points in nature
with points on the drawing pad, absolute comparisons of
shape can be made, allowing solid, instruction to be given
on how to improve them. Robert Douglas Hunter said this
about the sight size method, as handed down to him by
Gammell: “One of the most important things he taught me was
working sight size. I had never heard of it before—none of
us had ever heard of it before. It was most enlighenting and
most enabling. It was the single most important thing.
Unless your eye was screwed up, or you were lazy, you could
see shapes better, you could make them better.”
Much of
the teaching process in the atilier tradition takes place
when the teacher points out differences between what the
student has drawn and what nature actually looks like, after
which the teacher ask the student to step in and
compare the same. The teacher then asks, “How is what
you have drawn different from what you see? Is it more
curved or less? Longer or shorter? More to the left or up
higher? Or what?” Thus the student is led to make the proper
adjustments. This process becomes increasingly difficult as
the student progresses. Corrections become ever more subtle,
requiring the appropriate response from the eye, mind, and
hand of the student. And so the training continues, from the
relatively simple to the ever more complex. Mastery of the
best of the student’s ability is required at each step along
the way.
Emphasis
on seeing accurately is the necessary discipline of the
student years. Apparently people who are attracted to the
realist tradition of art love the visual experience of real
life and feel compelled to express themselves in those
terms; that is, in the making of pictures based on the true
representation of the way the world looks. The world, of
course, has an infinite number of faces. But in order to
represent any of them well, the student must first learn to
see what is. And this is what the discipline of
technical training is all about. In addition to core
curricula, an atelier or studio school provides instruction
in anatomy, design or composition, memory drawing, pigments,
mediums, and other technical arcana. But throughout it all
the foundation of the curricula is the one-on-one
student-teacher relationship. On this subject, Robert
Douglas Hunter has this to say of Gammell and Paxton: “[He]
came in and criticized Gammell on what he was trying to do.
And according to Gammell, he [Paxton] was always on target.
Not only in the drawing, which goes without saying, but also
with the designing. He had this in his background—Gerome,
Gerome, Gerome.”
Thankfully, today, an atelier is not the brave and lonely
enterprise it was when Gammell and Lack established their
studios; nevertheless, it is a difficult undertaking and
still remains well outside mainstream society. Since they
focus exclusively on training painters, these types of
schools cannot offer a wide range of academic courses, so
they cannot be accredited; therefore, it is impossible for
students to finance their tuitions through conventional
student loans. Instructors’ salaries are far below college
and university levels. Some of these school are nonprofit
organizations and eligible to apply to grant-making bodies
for funds, but in the daunting, capricious world of
fundraising, small studios face many obstacles. Fundamental
to all of these is the general, contemporary attitude about
art. The so-called, self-styled avant garde like to continue
to pose as revolutionaries, but they really own the art
world now. They are establishment; they are
the Academy. And although there is increasingly more
interest and receptiveness in our culture to
representational work, realism, in general, is still widely
viewed as retrogressive and passé. Furthermore, atelier-type
schools often do not have the kind of profile desired by
corporate sponsors. They are small, they serve a handful of
students directly, and they have little apparent impact on
the neighborhoods and communities in which they are located.
There is, of course, ample evidence of their positive impact
on painting and on the culture at large (observe the
increasing amount of representational art exhibits being
produced nationwide), but that is difficult to demonstrate
on a large scale. Finally, the directors of these studios
are understandably not up to the time consuming task of
fundraising. An atelier Director already performs a job
description that reads: teacher, bookkeeper, office manager,
school counselor, bill collector, janitor, handyman—in
addition to making their own art. It’s no task of the faint
of heart.
It is the
mission of each of these schools to not only carry on the
tradition as it was handed down to them but also to add to
it. Art—to be good—must be a living tradition. The
thorough grounding in disciplines of craft ensure the
maintenance of high standards of execution, thus making
possible the creation drawings and paintings of rare beauty.
Far from hindering expression (the litany of most
contemporary “artists” without technical skill) the
acquisition of demanding art skills liberates the
artist to make fine and original works. The atelier system
of teaching art in America is vital to the furtherance of
art in the next century. It is proven. And it continues to
produce beautiful art, which is its purpose and its
pleasure.
[Quotes of
Richard Lack and Robert Douglas Hunter were originally
published in The Classical Realism Journal, Volume
II, Issue 2. They are reused here in a different context by
permission of the Journal.]
Peter Bougie is a painter and teacher. He is
the Director of The Bougie Studio in Minneapolis where,
along with Brian Lewis, he has taught drawing and painting
since 1988. He was an Associate Editor of
The
Classical Realism Journal and has
published numerous articles. He has exhibited around the
country and abroad, and his paintings are in many private
and corporate collections.
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