First up is Luca Indraccolo.  We mentioned Luca in passing last week because a couple of his fabulous charcoals took pride of place at La Dolce Vita roadshow and indeed, Luca himself was present for pretty much the whole show demonstrating some live skills for the exhibition visitors.  Great news this week then that Luca has been invited to exhibit this piece at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition.

Luca has been studying at LARA for a year but this is effectively his third year of full time atelier studies having spent two years with Florence Academy before that.

Luca joins a growing list of LARA students and graduates whose work is being recognised in the wider art world. Last year saw Caroline Armstrong also exhibiting at the RPS and Anastasia Pollard shortlisted for the BP Portrait Award.

The really good news, at least from LARA’s point of view, is that Luca will be joining our teaching staff from this Autumn.

New visitors to this blog may be wondering how on Earth you get to be as good as Luca Indraccolo.  The answer is, of course, that you keep at it.  Nothing benefits drawing skills quite like putting in the hours, especially when you can do your practice under expert guidance.  A case in point is our very own Andrew Watson.  Andrew, like several of our students this year has been a regular student and contributor as ConceptArt.org before deciding to study in the atelier tradition for a while.  These images from this year’s study at LARA give some impression of how skills develop in the atelier method.

A regular practice of all our students is drawing from the cast.  These first two studies show meticulous work from casts of Michelangelo’s Eye and Ear. These are two details from the very well known Michelangelo David which have been used in art schools and ateliers pretty much from Michelangelo’s own day down to the present.

Some people think that exercises like drawing from the cast must be very dull and unrewarding especially as the end result will be a copy of an image that has been reproduced so many thousand times before.  But the really exciting thing is less the image produced on the paper and more the changes that take place in the artist’s brain, and in his or her skills.  If you love drawing, and especially if you have a slightly obsessive way of going about things this time-honoured exercise can be immensely satisfying.

What is more it usually has a profound effect on the development of the artist’s ability to portray form with accuracy and conviction as these later studies by Andrew Watson from the live model demonstrate.

This most recent study by Andrew shows just how naturally warmth and humanity start to come through in many students’ work once they begin to feel really confident in their technical skills.

Andrew Watson, by the way is one of several of our current students who focus on digital art, drawing on the graphics tablet directly into the computer, as well as on the classical techniques of atelier training.  Sometimes the old and the new really do complement each other perfectly.