Living artists in the classical, realist tradition
The Florence Academy - its director and some students - make a case for the classics on Nantucket this week.
BY MARLI GUZZETTA
Artists who have gone to the source - to Europe, to train

SELF PORTRAIT DANIEL GRAVES

in the classical Atelier style of at the Florence Academy - are bringing their interpretations of "water" to our little island this week, where they will show at the Brigham Gallery. Several students from the program and its director, Daniel Graves, will be in attendance.

For their training, the students work first in pencil and drawing until they have mastered that skill, then grow in their studies to work in color.

"This body of artists has been showing in top galleries and museums," said gallery owner Sara Boyce. "The gallery is really quite honored to host a show for them. The Florence Academy is very classic, but its students work with such a wonderful range of styles and subject matter."

Though the artists have all studied in Florence at the academy, they now reside around the world.

"I've been in Florence for 33 years now, and I came here because I wanted to study the tradition that I knew was out there," said Graves, who founded the school and is a working artist himself. "Now, our school has grown to over 100 students, and it's been quite a journey. When I first started, no one would look at the realist paintings going on. Most of us were just starving, and now there's so much interest."

Explaining the mission of the academy is harder to do without visuals, according to Graves, who called in to The Nantucket Independent from his home in Sweden.

"All the training is leading up to a sort of way of looking at nature, of presenting it," said Graves, who added that his students are taught in a tradition that dates back to Renaissance painters. "You're taking in the big picture. You select a focal point and try to arrange or interpret the scene of the whole view of it. ...The way opera dramatizes a story and music to pull at your heartstrings, we do the same thing. We're trying to pass along hundreds of years of tradition that gives [artists] the knowledge to present the world in ideas."

Graves has also discussed with Boyce the possibility of setting aside a place for a student from Nantucket to attend the Florence Academy in July 2007; Boyce is working on scholarship possibilities. (Interested students should submit a piece on the theme of "water" to Boyce before the Florence Academy's show, which will run for two weeks.)

The interest in cultivating young talent is central to Graves' focus on traditional training. "Just like a concert pianist begins early - the real rigorous training should be in full swing in artists' teenage years. In an ideal world, we would have them in a regimented program from an early age."

The general pattern for Graves' art students before they matriculate at the academy is to begin a four-year college, and then get second thoughts. "It normally happens in the middle of their university years, and they have this calling, this fight. 'Should I go to Florence or should I stay here and get a degree?'" Graves explained. "I tell them, 'If you want to teach, stay there. But if you want to be an artist, you don't have to have a degree - just the techniques and the exposure. It's a craft school, designed to teach people the fine art of painting and sculpture. You don't need a certificate for that."

I

OPENING

THE FLORENCE ACADEMY

OF ART

"WATER"
When: Friday, July 28, 5-8 p.m.
Where: The Brigham Galleries,
  54 Centre Street
Cost: Free
For more information,
  call 825-2525.