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Two Minneapolis schools working in an evolving tradition
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Peter Bougie
Tremeleau Mountain
Oil, 32 x 48 inches
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he Atelier and The Bougie Studio are two schools of traditional drawing and painting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, run by former students of Richard Lack.1 The principle instructors at The Atelier are Dale Redpath and Cyd Wicker. At The Bougie Studio, it is Brian Lewis and myself. We were all students of Lack at varying times from the late nineteen-seventies through the mid nineteen-eighties, at a time when Atelier Lack was one of only a handful of places in the world where a structured traditional training program could be found. We all had the experience of floundering around in other venues before finding Atelier Lack. We share the common experience of the artistic values Lack transmitted through his program, and the experience of having him as a teacher. Cyd and Dale worked directly under him as instructors in his full time program from the middle eighties until his retirement from teaching in 1992, and Brian and I sought and received his counsel on many issues in our teaching and in our own work after he left formal teaching behind.
As you might expect, the two schools have many things in common. One of the most fundamental similarities is our use of the sight-size method of measurement, a method also employed by many other schools that teach traditional methods today. Sight-size was a common method of working for both students and accomplished artists prior to the 20th century, when it fell into disuse in most art education settings. The term "sight-size" refers to making a drawing the size it would be if projected onto a plane extending left or right from your drawing board and intersecting your line of sight. This enables the artist to look at the subject and the drawing from a chosen vantage point and see them side-by-side, and appearing to be the same size. A vertical plumb line is established for measuring widths on the subject from an established point, and a hand-held plumb line is used to line up features on the subject with the corresponding features of the drawing. This enables the artist to make very objective, virtually absolute, comparisons of shape and proportion. It is a superlative learning tool because it helps the student see objectively how what he or she has done compares to nature; that is, is the knee too high or too low?
Peter Bougie at work
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Has the width measurement to the end of the nose been placed too far from the vertical plumb line, or too near to it? The sight-size method is designed to help answer questions like that. It is an excellent teaching tool because it establishes a common vantage point, an objective point of view, between student and teacher. There is no place for arguments about relative point of view, for the teacher and the student look at the subject from the same point of view, and the teacher is able to point out errors and incorrect observations objectively, and so help the student to see and understand what is really there, instead of offering vague generalities about whether or not something feels right or wrong. Finally, it is an excellent working method for any artist who wishes to use it in working directly from life in a controlled setting, because once you have mastered it, you are able to fix solid reference points on a drawing or painting quickly, and save yourself a lot of misapplied effort. I have sometimes heard students mistakenly refer to sight-size as a theory; but a theory is made in the absence of sufficient evidence. Sight-size is a well-known and proven method for taking measurements in a setting where the model is posed, or the subject is stationary. It's a tool. It is no more theoretical than a pencil or a paintbrush. It's useful when it's used in the right way. Above all, the sight-size method is used to help students develop and improve their "eye," and as they advance, their problem-solving skills.
"By reading a student's strengths and weaknesses, we can adapt the program's exercises to help them understand what is needed to achieve the next level of complexity."
There are many other areas of common ground between the two schools. Both feature individualized, one-on-one instruction as the primary means of teaching. Both provide settings in which beginning students are mixed with advanced students and are able to benefit from the advanced student's experience. Both strive to create an atmosphere in which students are encouraged to compete with themselves, in the sense of striving to improve on yesterday's work, in assessing some gain every day. Both are grounded in the Boston tradition in the sense of observing the note from nature; seeing the big look of light and shadow (the "Smash of light" as Lack called it), in observing color notes relative to each other, and in observing warm and cool variations - "vibrations" - within any given mass of color. Both programs are built around a traditional core curriculum based on working from life with the nude, the cast, and the head. Life drawing class is held five mornings a week. There is a mix of long and short poses, with emphasis on long poses. Students are assigned private workspaces where they pursue cast work, still life, head studies, and finally, advanced projects.
As you might also expect, there are some differences in approach and emphasis.
The Atelier
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Michael Sweere
Marble bust
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or three years after Richard Lack retired in 1992, The Atelier continued operations at the location on South Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis where Lack had taught for many years. In those first years, Wicker and Redpath faced the challenge of establishing themselves as teachers in their own right, where once they had been instructors working under Lack's authority. Although they had the advantage of inheriting well-established full-time and evening programs, it was a heavy responsibility following in Lack's footsteps. They continued training many of the students who had started at the Atelier when Richard was still teaching, and each year began to acquire a few more of their own. When the lease expired in 1995, the property owner had other things in mind for the space, and Cyd and Dale were faced with the daunting prospect of not only moving the entire operation, but with the exhaustive work of transforming a raw commercial space into a school over the course of a summer. "We had spent years at the Atelier Lack facility, as students and as teachers," said Cyd. "We felt it had been wisely used and we had a pretty good idea about what we needed to find. The problem was finding it. We spent a great deal of time looking before we found this space. It met our requirements: it was wide open so we could divide it up the way we wanted, it had tall north and east facing windows, and it was on the top floor, so we could install a skylight in the life drawing room." Dale adds, "Richard and Kathryn [Lack] were very generous. They donated all the equipment from the old Atelier Lack - casts, easels, books, lights - you name it. We also had the help of a group called 'Friends of the Atelier' who provided support with a fund-raiser and volunteer work to aid in the move. The transition went very smoothly." It was accomplished in time for school to start in September of 1995 in the new facility on East Hennepin, northeast of downtown Minneapolis. The new facility is more open and spacious than the old. Work by Richard Lack and Don Koestner, as well as work by Wicker and Redpath and some of their students, hangs on the walls of a small exhibition space off of the entry, and in the adjoining office. There is a large life room with a skylight for life drawing, another large room for evening classes in still-life and cast drawing and painting, and individual work spaces for fourteen full-time students.
Barbara Allen
Figure Study
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"We have found that the majority of students who apply to our school have had similar experiences to our own," Cyd observes, "in that they have been searching for this kind of training. They either had no knowledge that this kind of training was available, or they attend college hoping to find it and get a degree at the same time. But this kind of training is not available in colleges and universities. Even if it were, I think it would be very difficult for any college to give it the focus we do, because they have so many other requirements to meet in their four year curriculum." Cyd attended West Texas State University from 1975 to 1978, and was then awarded the Ellen Baettel Stoechel Scholarship from Yale. She also served an internship at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C. before attending Atelier Lack.
Dale endured some struggles before beginning her studies with Lack. "Like many young artists after high school I was looking for a realistic traditional art school to attend, one that could teach me to paint like the masters I'd seen in museums. But I couldn't find it, so while I was looking around, I spent a year at Normandale Junior College [Bloomington, MN]. After a year of that I'd had enough, but I was fortunate enough to see an Atelier Lack student show in the college's gallery. I called Richard Lack that night. I took three years of evening classes before entering the full time program in 1977. That was what I wanted. The largest influence on me was eighteen years of working with Richard Lack, first as a student and then as a teacher." She thinks the situation for students is somewhat different today than it was twenty years ago. "Today, there are more career opportunities available. This gives a student a future in terms of marketing their artwork, but more importantly, presents a culture less dismissive toward this tradition."
Wicker and Redpath apply their own carefully considered sensibilities, and their experience, to working with each student. "We work very hard to put our heads together about how to work with each student," Cyd comments. "The overall goal is to impart the language of painting to each one, so you have to get inside each one's head a little bit, and try to figure out how they work. One of the most important lessons we learned from Richard Lack was in being able to evaluate a student who was moving from one level to the next. This sensitivity has enabled us to customize our instruction to meet the needs of the students on an individual basis. The program is designed to proceed from task to task, exercise to exercise, and we have to help them understand that." Dale adds, "By reading a student's strengths and weaknesses, we can adapt the program's exercises to help them understand what is needed to achieve the next level of complexity. To take the general information and subtly adapt it to each individual is my goal in teaching. I want the students to comprehend what is important about all this, with their head and their heart, by the time they graduate."
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Barbara Allen
Girl in a Velvet Dress
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Cyd adds that, "We have found it extremely important to keep good lines of communication open between ourselves and the students, both as a whole, and with each individual. Open communication promotes healthy growth on the student's part. Without this exchange, it's too easy for the students to become confused, and the ability to receive and understand the instruction they need to achieve their goals breaks down." Dale says, "This same communication makes it easier for us to see when a student has reached a limit in an approach to some problem, and then we can provide an alternative course of action for him or her. Our experience has helped us develop these skills. We've learned what to emphasize in the early training to prepare students for advanced training."
"Our evening program, and our summer program, has also been helpful to us," says Cyd. "The evening program often feeds students into the full-time program, and provides opportunities for some of our advanced students to teach." Dale adds, "The two-week summer workshop gives students a taste of what full-time study is like. It's designed to be as much like the full-time program as it can be in the context of a short term. It gives students an introduction to life work, cast work, and portraiture."
Wicker and Redpath emphasize that they work hard, together, on how to approach the needs of each student. Cyd states, "As I said, the overall goal is to impart the language of painting to each student. In order to do this we try to gain an understanding of how each one views things, and then observe how he or she works. The program proceeds from exercise to exercise, developing skills of the mind, the eye, and the hand. Working with students individually, we learn their strengths and weaknesses. We strive to give them the information they need to find answers to their questions, and solutions that are true to nature as well as beautiful in design."
The Bougie Studio
he Bougie Studio is located south of downtown Minneapolis, three blocks west of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It occupies the second floor of a commercial building fronting on Nicollet Avenue South in a lively neighborhood of ethnic markets, shops, and restaurants. The school has been at this location since 1988, and we've made many improvements to the facility, functional and aesthetic, in that time. The space is divided up into a large life room with a skylight facing forty-five degrees due north, and individual workspaces for twelve students, with an office on the premises. Curriculum Co-Director Brian Lewis also maintains his studio here. The artwork hanging on the walls ranges from pieces by Brian and myself, to work by Lack, Koestner, and Steve Gjertson, to exceptional examples of student work from over the years.
Brian and I have worked very closely for a long time at tailoring the curriculum to the needs of individual students, and at developing and modifying the program as we see the need for it. "I think we have a rock-solid foundation, based on what Lack developed, and in turn on what he learned from Gammell," states Brian. "The basis of all this is something that's been handed down to us. It's a fundamental body of knowledge, a way of doing things, and of looking at things." Brian studied art at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s prior to attending Atelier Lack, and is fond of saying that his training under Richard Lack was "The best educational experience of my life. There's no comparing it to what I was 'taught' at the U of M, at that time. Lack had real information to give about how to see, and how to paint pictures, and that's what we try to do here."
What is that "real" information, and what does it mean when I say we "tailor" the curriculum? The curriculum is designed to train a painter who wants to be the kind of artist that bases his or her art on the visual truth of nature. When students begin to do exercises within the structure of the program, we carefully observe what they do. With all beginning students, this means that we observe how they make the shapes and values in their drawings more or less incorrectly. We demonstrate how to make corrections, and if the student shows a tendency toward a certain weakness, we assign an exercise to help correct that. For instance, if a student is struggling mastering sight-size and the plumb line in life class, we might put that student to work doing short-duration lay-ins of cast drawings until he or she demonstrates the ability to line up points accurately between the subject and the drawing. Or, if a student is using the plumb line well enough in life class to put a figure with reasonable proportions on the paper, but is describing that figure with a shapeless, hesitant line, we might assign an exercise of reproducing figures from flat copy, in order to help develop a sense of how a draftsman uses a line to describe a contour or a form. These are some fundamental examples of how the program is "tailored," but the same principle applies to more complex projects. This is where the 'real' information is. A good deal of it is practical solutions to practical problems, and this information is acquired by the student in working through the problems set up by the curriculum, with guidance and assistance from myself and from Brian. There is a very strong experiential aspect to the training in that the student acquires skill and confidence by mastering each problem as it is encountered. In the course of all this, students and instructors must meet the challenges that arise. These are difficult skills to master, and the student also must learn to be patient with his or her ambitions and frustrations. Today's mistake, this morning's failure, is the ground from which success will grow tomorrow. I like to tell students that this training takes the time that it takes; each challenge requires of you what it requires of you, there is no bargaining with it, and there is no accomplishment at the end of a short-cut. In a very real, profound sense, the student must submit to the requirements of the discipline, in order to emerge as a master of it.
Brian Lewis at work
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Brian Lewis describes some of the challenges of working in this kind of program. "I emphasize procedure, especially early on; how to set up for a drawing, or any kind of work, and keeping the whole thing going, not getting caught up in the details too soon," he says. "That applies to drawing or painting heads, or still life, or, beyond that, into figurative work. "Seeing big" is particularly important in landscape painting. Starting out with the proper procedure applies to everything.
"I always go back to what Lack said regarding discipline, which is to do your work at the assigned time, even if you don't particularly feel like working. Establish good work habits. Be on time for class. Be at the studio working. Even as a student, you should approach the training as you would approach a professional task or assignment.
"In this kind of training, I think the biggest challenge for both teachers and students is seeing value relationships correctly. This is difficult not only for students but for practicing painters. As you get older, I think you get better at it, but I don't think you ever master it. It's something that you always have to be concerned about and aware of. People get better at seeing the 'big look' of something with a lot of practice over time, but it's still something you really have to pay attention to. We're trying to train students to do this most fundamental of things, to look for and see the values correctly, and to be rigorously disciplined about checking and re-checking the work. Representational work quickly falls apart if the values aren't seen correctly. You must get the lights light enough, and the darks dark enough, and the two in proper relation to each other. Then you can start to see half tones, which are the most elusive in quality. Of course, you can't model anything without using half-tones, and if you don't see the overall effect of value as it really is, you won't have any half-tones to model with."
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Peter Bougie giving a critique
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We decided early on to have beginning students start work on head drawings in charcoal as soon as they demonstrated some mastery of the rudiments of cast work. This was a departure from our own training, but it seemed like a logical thing to do, since we were always telling beginning students to be diligent in doing their cast work because it would pay off when it came time to do heads. We've seen students succeed at this, even in their first few months of study. We also keep three pastel sets available for student use. Some students' benefit from working in pastel, especially if they are struggling with the concept of color value -- seeing the hue and the value of a mass of light or shadow at the same time. Since the colors of a pastel set are arranged in gradated values, use of them helps facilitate the understanding of value and color combined. It also helps students understand how colors put side by side or one over the other mix optically. Color exercises with a limited palette are also sometimes used. Every year we produce a series of lectures on various topics, ranging from the mixing of pigments, the use of mediums, and the particular qualities of various oils, to practical matters like stretching canvas and framing or matting work, to composition and anatomy. The anatomy lectures are designed to give an overview of muscular and skeletal structure, with a strong emphasis on how knowledge of anatomy can be applied in a pragmatic way to drawing and painting the figure. I often refer to anatomical facts and features when critiquing life work. In 2001-02, we are also implementing course requirements in short-term copies and sketches to compliment the long-term exercises. In addition, we'll be assigning studies in how figures are used expressively in painting, in how this is accomplished, and in how it differs from, but is related to, studies in life class.
The Atelier and The Bougie Studio are each in their own way carriers of a tradition that is living and evolving. For many years, students and instructors alike have focused on doing the work at hand. We hope to continue doing it for a long time to come.
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