Lecture w/ Daniel Graves - Art and The Academy, Continuum

Dear Patrons,

Thank you for your support! This past week we sent out our first batch of art print rewards for certain tiers of subscription to The FAA Collective Patreon. For those of you who qualify to receive them, we hope they arrive safely in your hands soon! In pairing with the much anticipated send off of the prints (A limited edition series of a drawing by Daniel Graves) fulfilled, this week we would like to present you with a video-recorded lecture by Daniel Graves, Founder and Director of The Florence Academy of Art. In this lecture, titled Continuum, Daniel Graves explores the vast tradition of classical art that is being kept alive and expands on his own vision of it. Detailing his own personal education, including where and who he trained alongside, Daniel also covers in depth the lineage of instructors, institutions, and philosophies The Florence Academy of Art and its methods are born from. 

Throughout this lecture there is a constant theme “Our way forward is in the past” and Daniel repeatedly emphasizes the necessity of an artist to ask important questions such as “What does it mean to be an artist?” and encourages them to follow their own journey for there is no formula to being a great artist. Through an exploration of his mentors, his methods, philosophies behind his art, and some of the thought processes and meanings behind some of his personal work, we are shown how the well of knowledge of artists from the past is not only remembered, but being actively utilized and slowly reshaped by artists today for the contemporary world. 

If you ever wondered about the history of The Florence Academy and the origin of the academy’s methods, this is a lecture for you! We hope you thoroughly enjoy!

In February of 2019 Daniel Graves’ work was exhibited in a show of a similar name Continuum, The Art of Daniel Graves at the Accademia Delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, Italy. This is available to view online https://www.florenceacademyofart.com/continuum-the-art-of-daniel-graves/

To see more of the work of Daniel Graves please visit:

Website: http://www.danielgravespaintings.com/ 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danielgravesart/

FAA Alumni Gallery: https://www.florenceacademyofart.com/alumni-gallery/daniel-graves/

FAA Faculty Page: https://www.florenceacademyofart.com/faculty/daniel-graves/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DanielGravesArt/

About Daniel Graves:

Born in 1949, in Rochester, New York, Daniel Graves graduated from the Maryland Art Institute of Art in 1972 where he studied with Joseph Sheppard and Frank Russell. He continued his studies at the Villa Schifanoia Graduate School of Fine Art in Florence, Italy, with Richard Serrin. Following a course of training with Richard Lack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he taught at the Atelier Lack Studio of Fine Art. In the late 1970s, Graves returned to Florence and undertook individual study with Nerina Simi, who maintained a classical nineteenth-century studio. Ms. Simi was the daughter of the Florentine painter Filadelfo Simi, who had studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme, the head of the French Academy in Paris in the 1870s.

With such a rich background of training, Graves has created a style of oil painting that blends the Florentine tradition of Simi and the realist painter, Pietro Annigoni, with the draftsmanship of the French artist, Charles Bargue. Graves was the first to discover Bargue’s, Cours des Dessins, and to integrate this masterwork into the Florence Academy’s teaching curriculum.

Daniel Graves joined Charles Cecil to found Studio Cecil-Graves in Florence, which for nearly a decade trained many practitioners of classical realism. Graves then established The Florence Academy of Art in 1991. The Florence Academy of Art has been in the forefront of classical realist art education for more than twenty years.

In “Tradition in the 21st Century,” an essay published in the exhibition catalogue, Realism Revisited: The Florence Academy of Art (2003), Graves described his training in Old Masters techniques and heralded the classical realist renaissance in aesthetics and art education. The exhibition traveled throughout Europe and the United States. Practitioners, connoisseurs and scholars of modern representational art recognize “Realism Revisited” and its accompanying catalogue as defining moments in the appreciation of classical realist art. In April 2008, Daniel Graves and The Florence Academy of Art received the Excellence in Art Education Award from the Portrait Society of America.

When he is not teaching, Graves is an active painter of figures, portraits and still lifes in his studio in Florence. He pursues landscape painting during his extensive travels. His work is in both public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad.