Sunday, December 26, 2010

The Pedagogical Work of Arthur DeCosta



When Pamela Belyea and Gary Faigin asked me to teach traditional drawing and oil painting courses full time at the school which they founded, The Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, I worked for a while on a special series of foundation courses and workshops which would include as much of the pedagogy of Mr. DeCosta as possible. 




Saturday, December 25, 2010

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Tradition.



Influences.


Here is some of the work of my teachers. People with whom I studied at PAFA or sought out for private tutoring or apprenticeships.

Ben Kamihira




Arthur DeCosta






Deborah Deichler






Sidney Goodman 






Nelson Shanks









Scott Noel




The Philadelphia School of painting is observational in both its nature and history. That tradition forms an unbroken line at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the first art school and museum in America (and one of the earliest schools of its kind anywhere in the world). 
While always welcoming to the highest levels of modernism it’s been a renowned example of realist traditions since at least the time of Thomas Eakins. In the 1990s those traditions were transformed under the influence of Scott Noel. Noel’s demonstrations and articulation of painting ideas extending back through Lennart Anderson, Edwin Dickinson and Charles Webster Hawthorne, among others, gave rise at the Pennsylvania Academy to the school of art known as Perceptual Painting and to a new, or refreshed, era of relevance for observational painting.