T e d S e t h J a c o b s b r i n g s Tr a d i t i o n o f R e a l i s m f o r p o r t r a i t d e m o n s t r a t i o n
BY LAURA RASKIN INDEPENDENT ARTS WRITER

After he had gone to art school at the Art Students League in New York City, Ted Seth Jacobs helped his mother with the black and white wash fashion drawings with which she made a living selling to The New York Times and catalogues.

The first thing to master with the subtlest and the most complicated, said Jacobs.

Jacobs, who is represented on Nantucket by The Brigham Galleries, is visiting the island for the first time. He is

world-renowned artist who paints still lifes, landscapes and nudes, and he is particularly known for his portraits. On Friday, Dec. 2, he demonstrates his talent as he draws a subject with conte chalk in The Brigham Galleries from 4 to 7 p.m.

He has been staying with gallery owner Sara Boyce during his sojourn from France where he lives and runs the art school L'Ecole Albert Defois, at which he is the only teacher for a rotating group of a maximum of 10 students.

Boyce said she contacted Jacobs after she opened her gallery when she was getting in touch with top art schools to tell them about herself. "He had this incredible body of drawings and paintings," she said. Boyce asked if Jacobs would be interested in portrait commissions through her gallery. A portrait of Boyce by Jacobs hangs in her gallery. "He's just a fabulous artist and he's trained thousands of people. He has really shaped the realism movement," she said.

Jacobs had been visiting France for years and lived there for a time in the 1970s before he decided to move there permanently. "I felt at home there," Jacobs said in a telephone interview last week. "It's something I never felt in New York City. I like the lifestyle, the values."

Jacobs named his school after the mayor in the town at the time, who, although he could have, did not make Jacobs go through the traditional red tape in starting up. After spending junior high and high school in Long Beach, New York, Jacobs went to the Art Students League at 16. His first teacher was 72 and had been trained in Paris at the famous Academie Julian. Through him, Jacobs inherited a set of traditional principles for painting realistically that descended from the ancient Greeks through the art academies in France in the 17th and 18th centuries.

"I found that they agreed with what I saw when I looked at the model and life. A lot of them seemed artificial. The ones that were valuable I kept, the ones I thought were artificial I replaced," he said. He calls it "restructured realism."

Although Jacobs has been commissioned to do countless portraits of various people, some of them well known, no two are the same, at least on The Brigham Galleries' Web site. "The way I interpret is always the same. I try and identify a sense of each sitter," he said.

He never works from a photograph and never measures proportions. On Friday he will block in the shape of his sitter's head, then their general proportions as they appear to the eye, then their features.

Jacobs wrote a book for artists in which he explains that painting is based on light on form and how the two interact. "Light is invisible, form is invisible. The whole process depends on both," he said.

"I think every human being has a beauty and I try to present them that way. We're all products of nature and nature is always beautiful," said Jacobs.

See Jacobs give a portrait demonstration at The Brigham Galleries on Friday, Dec. 2, from 4 to 7 p.m., upstairs at 50 Main St.

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