the ruben’s project.
The Great Lakes Academy of Fine Art is built upon a tradition that developed in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, as an alternative to the official École des Beaux-Arts and other state-sanctioned academies. Occasionally, an artist would open an “atelier” – commonly now known as “studio” - and invite students who admired their work to study with them. Still grounded in the fundamental, foundational training methods, this allowed for diversity and experimentation through different approaches to teaching and learning. In a sense, this was very similar to the apprenticeship tradition that began in the Middle Ages and flourished throughout the Renaissance and into the seventeenth century. Young students would move into a workshop to train, often starting out by sweeping the floors and grinding paint. Over time of gaining skills they would be given more difficult assignments. Years gone by, some of the advanced students earned the honor to even work on their master’s work itself. The most successful apprentices would eventually open their own studios, attracting commissions and their own apprentices and thus, the process would begin once again. Michelangelo and Da Vinci were trained in this manner, and artists such as Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens ran such workshops, with Rubens’ workshop possibly being the most successful.
Our school merges both French Impressionistic tradition with the skills and methodologies of French academies and ateliers. Our primary focus is to train our students’ eyes to see nature truthfully and accurately. Consequently, the student can acquire proper translation of the three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Our students are trained to paint from life - the scenes and set ups that are arranged before them truthfully and accurately. This still leaves, however, an entire subset of the great Western art tradition unaddressed: the imaginative composition (a composition that exists only in the artist’s imagination, or one that is just impractical to set up in front of them). The difficulty in imaginative composition is making the result look both natural and believable. As if the artist had come across the scene and was given unlimited time to paint it. Think of all the great paintings featuring religious themes, mythological subjects, crowd scenes, images full of actions, etc. Successfully painting the imaginative requires an additional layer of education - and in some ways, a higher-level skillset.
In order to pass this experience along to their students, GLAFA birthed the “Rubens Project”. Jeffrey and Brock incorporate this component each year, taking turns leading and designing a composition for a large, imaginative project. The senior class assists on the project, creating many of the studies needed based upon the instructors designs, stretching and priming the canvas, and completing the bister underpainting along with some of the final passages. Jeffrey and Brock tackle the more complex areas and make corrections as needed as they balance the work with the students. The instructors make sure that the final piece meets both of their personal standards on all levels, even though they may have not painted every square inch of the canvas themselves.
The instructors and graduating students worked on this project Friday afternoons throughout the past year. Jeffrey took on the first project and chose to immortalize our first graduating class within the doors of GLAFA. He arranged the scene with everyone present to develop the composition, which was the only time everyone was in front of the easel at one time. After locking in the composition, they worked up drawings followed by color studies, including head and hand studies, as well as different secondary elements such as the wall of casts.
Most of the great paintings hanging in museums around the world were created in this communal manner. After participating in this project, not only have the students had the opportunity to see how an imaginative piece such as this is accomplished, but also gained hands-on practical knowledge by being intimately involved in all aspects of completing an imaginative piece collaboratively.
This is the first complete Rubens Project from GLAFA:
Graduated student Eric (far left in painting):
“I think the most helpful thing we learned from the Rubens project was how a very large painting could be broken down into a series of steps and approached task-by-task. This differs a bit from the usual coursework, where we are usually presented with the whole subject at all times and can paint from it directly. The hardest part, I’d say, was trying to unify the picture from a bunch of piecework studies into something that felt cohesive. In regards to my future career, I have many ideas for projects where the “subject” exists mainly in my imagination or otherwise can’t be painted directly from life, so learning these steps will surely help in making such work a reality.”
