The Alchemy of Italy
Chiave d’Arco Ltd. – The Keystone of Excellence
Summer 2011
The Jerusalem Studio School is pleased to announce the return of its summer programs at the historic Certosa di Pontignano under the new management of Chiave d’Arco, a company formed to develop and lead the “keystone” artistic experience at the Certosa, including other school and artist-led courses, seminars and workshops. Please visit the Chiave d’Arco website for full information and registration for all art courses being offered in 2011.
The JSS Master Class Program is the educational core of the Jerusalem Studio School (JSS). It has distinguished itself as an intensive, incubator-like full-time studio program for the highly motivated and gifted student. It is not only guided by focused, probing instruction and critique grounded in the creative process – in learning for the eye and the hand – it aims to foster the tenacity and independence necessary to work through the diverse complexities artistic endeavors surely require. Work in the Master Class is pursued via the immediacy of experience, through continual practice, engagement with great masterworks and hard uncompromising work. In the Master Class, it is the doing that produces understanding.
The JSS at the Certosa takes the model of this Master Class and plunges it into the sensual root and sap of the western world’s artistic heart. Italy’s art, landscape, architecture, artifacts and light converge into an integrated comprehensive experience of art and life that exists nowhere else. The sheer quality and quantity of it dwarfs all that comprises the Western world’s museums combined. This program nourishes a lifetime.
The Master Class in Italy is under the tutelage of Ken Kewley, Stuart Shils and Israel Hershberg. The 2011 program offers a knock-out line-up of excursions to Naples, the Piero della Francesca Tour of Arezzo, San Sepolcro & Urbino, Rome, Florence, Assisi & Perugia. A few places remain during the 6 week program, available by application process only. CLICK HERE for full details about the program. REGISTER HERE.
The Certosa Studio Program is a shorter, intense program option offering 1, 2 or 3 week stays from July 24-August 14, 2011. Led by Sigal Tsabari, a teacher in the JSS Continuing Education program, and guest artist Giovanni Casadei, an Italian painter based in Philadelphia with over 20 years of alla prima painting and teaching experience, the program provides intensive teaching for students of all levels of outdoor painting experience and carefully constructed excursions and museum visits. Daily interaction with the landscape of the Certosa is accented by painting demonstrations, evening slide talks and additional drawing sessions, both from the figure and in the city of Siena. CLICK HERE for more info.
Additionally, Chiave d’Arco is pleased to announce that registration is now open for the new Chiave d’Arco Workshop, “Throwing Light on the Figure” with Catherine Kehoe, August 7-21, 2011. Designed for students with some prior experience in oil painting, the workshop will focus on the perceptual challenges of painting the figure in different indoor and outdoor settings through a progression of one-session paintings to longer, more sustained pieces. A variety of interior and outdoor options at the Certosa will be explored. CLICK HERE for more info.
Chiave d’Arco is also pleased to share news of an upcoming landscape painting course at the Certosa led by Dean Fisher through the Silvermine Arts Center of New Canaan, Conn. Slated for August 27 – September 3, 2011, additional details will be added to Chiave d’Arco’s website as soon as they are available.
Future Chiave d’Arco workshops and courses are currently being planned for 2011-2012 to offer a growing series of top-notch drawing and painting seminars with some of the best teachers and artists today in the unparalleled context of the Certosa di Pontignano. Visit Chiave d’Arco’s website to learn more and subscribe to future announcements.
Powers of Observation & Painting Perceptions Feature Israel Hershberg
Hershberg, “Todi From Afar”, 2009, oil on linen mounted on wood, 8.75 x 15.75 in., 22.2 x 40 cm
“A work of art should be a time capsule in which a painter deposits his most cherished, formative painterly desires” — Israel Hershberg
Painting: Powers of Observation, the outstanding website created by artist and teacher Catherine Kehoe, has recently featured Israel Hershberg, Artist, Founder & Artistic Director of the Jerusalem Studio School. Israel Hershberg: My Palette(s) shares the artist’s full range of colors and choices over the years in the Painters and their Palettes section, in a distinguished group of contemporary painters – Lois Dodd, Susanna Coffey, John Dubrow, Emily Eveleth, Janet Fish, Alex Kanevsky, David Kelley, Tim Kennedy, Ken Kewley, Dik Liu, Nancy McCarthy, George Nick, Sangram Majumdar, Richard Raiselis, Hal Reddicliffe and Stuart Shils. Kehoe was also a recent feature here in the JSS Blog Interview Series.
Hershberg’s palette
The Painting Perceptions blog, has just posted a recent interview which Larry Groff conducted with Israel Hershberg, with probing questions about Hershberg’s pivotal artistic experiences and influences. Hershberg also reflects deeply on the state of art education today and his motivations for founding the Jerusalem Studio School. Addressing all facets of the compounding dilemma figurative artists must tackle today, Hershberg emphasizes the necessary sustained physical involvement with great works of art:
“You know, what really seduces me besides the perceptual impulse is the primacy of another idea that for a lack of a better word, I’ll call encapsulation – the idea that a work of art should be a time capsule in which a painter deposits his most cherished, formative painterly desires – in the Joycean sense, of being forged in the smithy of one’s soul – the direct, unmediated experiences and communions we have had with great works of art. Works of art which have imprinted themselves indelibly on the nervous system, coming together, incarnate, as perceptual impulse. I’m not talking about facile quotations, but rather a harnessing and investment of those painterly desires wantonly, intimately and formationally in the conceiving of a work. Morandi and Balthus for me were and are great exemplars of that. In Morandi the whole of the genius of Italian art comes together in an astounding distillation of this idea but with the past’s requisite narratives clarified out. In Balthus the engagement is not only intimate , it is encyclopedic and manifold – the Greeks, Romans, Giotto, Piero, Masaccio, the Venetians, Sienese… The idea of existing on both edges of history was and is a state I very much desire to achieve.” (read more)
Hershberg, “Distant Hillside, From Villa Pieve,” 2010, Oil on linen and wood, 32.8 x 32.8 cm
And to find this sustained physical involvement with great works, Hershberg discusses the revitalization of the “grand tour” of Italy – the incomparable artist experience – through the JSS summer programs at the Certosa di Pontignano:
“This Italy program incorporates that pedagogical culture of the JSS Master Class, and plunges it into the sensual root and sap of the western world’s artistic heart. Italy is the place where so much converges to imprint upon the artist’s nervous system, and as in no other place. The landscape, hill towns, architecture, frescos, churches, monuments, museums, artifacts and light converge into an integrated comprehensive experience of art and life that exists nowhere else. The sheer quality and quantity of it dwarfs all that comprises the Western world’s museums combined. It nourishes a lifetime…” (read more)
For information on the JSS at the Certosa summer programs for artists and art students, open internationally by application, click here.
Stuart Shils Workshop in San Diego
Artist Stuart Shils, a Guest Artist of the JSS and one of the Faculty for the JSS Master Class Program at the Certosa, will be leading a three-day intensive painting workshop in San Diego from April 28-May 1, 2011. Shils has been a regular feature here on the JSS Blog, both by interview and contribution, and recently led a printing workshop for the JSS.
For a full description of the workshop, click here. Contact larry@paintingperceptions.com for any questions.
Stuart Shils (b. 1954, Philadelphia) studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (PAFA) with Seymour Remenick, Philadelphia College of Art and Temple University and is a PAFA faculty member. Shils is currently represented in NY by Steven Harvery Fine Art Projects and by Davis & Langdale Co. with an upcoming solo exhibition, “Recent Monotypes,” from March 19-April 23, 2011. Shils has painted the landscape for over 25 years, with his work presented in solo shows in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Cork (Ireland) and Tel Aviv. He has also shown with other major galleries such as Tibor de Nagy, NYC, and Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco.
Critical review and commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Art in America, the New Yorker, American Artist and numerous other publications. Grants and awards include an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and an Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. An annual JSS Guest Artist and visiting critic at the Vermont Studio Center, Shils teaches painting across the country and abroad, including the 2011 JSS at the Certosa summer Master Class program in Italy.
