The London Atelier of Representational Art was founded in response to continuing demand from students for a structured approach to learning. The School teaches fundamentally important aspects of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture from life, through the “Sight Size” method, and uses a specific approach designed to teach the essential concepts of proportion, line, gesture, form and light.
Inspired by the Atelier Method of instruction, the LARA offers unique training in representing sustained poses of no less than one week and up to one month giving optimum time to observe and understand the figure.
LARA’s philosophy supports a return to discipline in art. By employing traditional, time-tested methods, the LARA seeks not to return to the past, but rather to build upon it. We provide students with the opportunity to explore distinctive aspects of their chosen subject through the development of draughtsmanship, direct study of works and a practical understanding of the materials and methods of the artist. By this means and through the resulting identification of clear artistic objectives, students acquire creative self-confidence, and visual understanding with subtle and precise powers of description.
Great things are only done in art when the creative instinct of the artist has a well-organised executive faculty at its disposal. If in science, by comparison, observation is made more effective by the use of mechanical instruments in registering facts, then the facts in which art deals - being those of feeling- can only be recorded by the feeling instrument that is Man. Such artistic facts are missed entirely by any mechanically devised substitutes. Artistic intelligence is not interested in things from the standpoint of mechanical accuracy, but in the effect of observation on the living consciousness; the sentient individual in each of us. The same fact accurately portrayed by a number of artistic intelligences will be different in each case, whereas the same fact accurately expressed by a number of scientific intelligences should be identical every time. It is the infinitely personal gap between the representation of something and the thing itself that the artist endeavours to describe.
LARA understands this emotional response is beyond the scope of teaching and people cannot be taught how to feel, but we can be surrounded with conditions calculated to stimulate any natural feeling we may possess. This is achieved by familiarising students with the best works of art and nature. The painter expresses his feelings through representations of the visible world of nature, and through combinations of form and colour inspired in his imagination. If he fails from lack of skill to make his representation convincing to reasonable people, no matter how sublime has been his artistic intention, he will probably have landed in the ridiculous. Yet, so great is the power of direction exercised by the emotions on the artist, that seldom does his work fail to convey something, when genuine feeling has been the motive.
In all good art, the matter expressed and the manner of its expression are so intimate as to have become one. The deeper associations connected with the subject are only concerns for art in so far as they affect its appearance and take shape as form and colour in the mind of the artist, informing the whole process of the painting, even to the brush strokes. As in a good poem, it is impossible to consider the poetic idea isolated from the words that express it: they are fired together at its creation. LARA believes a command over this power of representation and expression is absolutely necessary if one is to be capable of doing anything worthy of his art.
