THE PROGRAM
Master the tried and true traditional methods of learning the craft of drawing and painting. Cultivate and orient your mind towards the true, good, and beautiful.
Core Curriculum
Our Core Curriculum takes students through an incremental process of mastering the fundamentals of drawing and painting. Core students should expect to work on their projects Monday through Friday 9 AM - 5PM. The academic year is divided into three ten week trimesters. On average, a student will take three to four years to complete the entirety of the curriculum.
1. Drawing Essentials
This brief course consists of simple exercises to allow the student to become familiar with his or her drawing tools and best practices.
2. Bargue Drawing Course
“For imitation is natural to man from his infancy. Man differs from other animals particularly in this, that he is imitative, and acquires his rudiments of knowledge in this way; besides, the delight in it is universal.” -Aristotle
Created in the 19th century, the Bargue drawing course was used to teach students how to progress in their proficiency. The drawings are impressively subtle but are also particularly helpful because of the way Bargue interpreted and simplified forms.
3. Simplified Forms Course
“Drawing is the probity of art. To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modeling. See what remains after that!” -Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Before moving onto complex forms as seen in nature it is highly beneficial to study and render the fall of light on simplified geometric shapes. This course takes you through the most common and basic of these forms.
4. Cast Drawing Course
“He drew from the antique and copied from his predecessors till certain ideals of formal completeness were absolutely fixed in his mind; then when he drew from nature he instinctively subordinated the observed facts to the patterns established in his imagination.” -Kenneth Clark
An established practice in European studios was the drawing of sculptures from antiquity. By removing the difficulty of color, the student works to obtain a mastery of modeling the sense of form on a 2-D surface.
5. Portrait Drawing Course
“The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting.” -Titian
After learning the process of drawing from a still object, a student progresses on to working from a live model, which poses additional challenges such as simplifying forms and interpreting color into value.
6. Still Life Course
“Beauty is ever present like the light of the sun – even in the most humble object – only it takes an artist’s vision to detect it, and an artist’s skill to reproduce it.” -Emil Carlsen
Still life drawings and paintings are a preliminary study for both landscape painting and multi-figural compositions. In addition they offer the student the exercise of rendering various shapes and textures. As such, practicing them is immensely helpful for the students' development.
7. Figure Drawing/ Painting
8. Imaginative Multifigure Composition
“The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.” -Eugene Delacroix
One of the most challenging tasks for the figurative artist is arranging a unified and believable multifigural composition in an imagined environment. This course guides the student through this complex task.
The Full-Time Student
Tuition: $2,500 per Trimester
The Part-Time Student
The part-time student is guided through the core curriculum building up his or her skill one course at a time. They receive the same level of attention and instruction as full-time students do.
Tuition: $1,500 per Trimester
Trimester Dates for 2024 -2025
Fall 2024
September 16 - November 22
(Thanksgiving break)
Winter 2024-2025
December 2 - December 14
(Christmas break)
January 6 - February 28
Spring 2025
March 10 - April 11
(Holy Week and Easter break)
April 21 - May 23
Continuing Education
“Painting is a companion with whom one may hope to walk a great part of life’s journey. One by one the more vigorous sports and exacting games fall away, but painting is a friend who makes no undue demands, excites to no exhausting pursuits, keeps faithful pace even with feeble steps, and holds her canvas as a screen between us and the envious eyes of time or the surly advance of decrepitude.” -Winston S. Churchill
The continuing education program allows for a student to go at his or her own pace. While it’s still recommended that a program be followed, students also have the option of choosing their own projects and receiving technical assistance, guidance and feedback on each.
Tuition
$100 per three-hour session
INSTRUCTORS
Robert Puschautz, Executive Director
Robert received his bachelor’s in Painting and Art Education from the University of Urbana Champaign and continued his studies in classical painting at the Ravenswood Atelier in Chicago. Since moving to Texas he has been creating religious paintings for the Diocese of Tyler and beyond. He is particularly interested in religious subjects, but finds inspiration and metaphor in the created world for still life and landscape paintings.
AnneMarie Johnson, Art Fellow
AnneMarie graduated from the University of Dallas in Irving, TX, in 2018 with a B.A. in Art - Painting, and studied in the intensive drawing program at the Florence Academy of Art, US in New Jersey. She completed independent graduate work in painting and art history at the University of Dallas. She recently finished studying under Jordan Sokol and Amaya Gurpide at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts (Old Lyme, CT), where she was an assistant instructor of drawing. In her body of work, she is particularly drawn to moments when the imperfect and corporeal are pierced by the infinite and transcendent.
STUDIO LOCATION
410 S. Broadway
Tyler TX, 75702
Our newly renovated studio is centered in the flourishing downtown area of Tyler, Texas across the street from the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.