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The Angel Academy of Art, Florence is a private institution that teaches drawing and painting in the old master tradition. While this tradition has its roots at least as early as 14th-century Italy, the curriculum and the teaching techniques are grounded on those of the 19th-century European academies and are the result of over 30 years of research and experiment by the school’s founder, Michael John Angel. This successful step-by-step process teaches the student to thoroughly appropriate the skills needed for representational painting. M.J. Angel, born in England in 1946, has been painting and studying art since his mid-teens and has himself studied under the great Italian master, Pietro Annigoni. Through Annigoni, Mr. Angel was made aware of the lack of an effective method of teaching in the universities and public art schools. Even in Europe, where some vestiges of the old methods of cast drawing and still-life remain, the official schools lack the knowledge to effectively teach Realism and frustrate the student by trying to apply various 20th century concepts to a pre-20th century discipline. At the Angel Academy, on the other hand, the principles involved in these disciplines are found to be concretely describable and, through a series of exercises over a four-year period, the student learns how to master them. The Programmes The Fundamental Programme evolved from a combination of Mr. Angel’s research and that of a number of students of the great American painter, R.H. Ives Gammell, whose pedigree, in turn, goes back to the French Academy. The programme begins with work from a specially prepared set of lithographs, which quickly teach the student the basic skills of accurate rendering (the Angel Academy of Art uses the best set of instructional lithos: that made by Charles Bargue in the 19th century, at the behest of Jean-Léon Gérôme. The studio owns many of the originals). With these new-found skills, the student progresses to cast work, first in charcoal, then in oil paint, and from these to still-life, the best arena in which to learn colour, texture and the illusion of three dimensions. Work from the live model begins immediately and is central to our programmes. To acquire the utmost in accuracy and execution, the school uses the venerable “sight-size” method. Beyond this, the Angel Academy of Art teaches a system of comparative measurement in which the student learns to incorporate the conceptual with the realistic. This system is unique among modern-day Realist ateliers. |
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