It has been just about a year since my husband and I left North America. We were married barely a month before we set off to discover what Florence was like as a lived in city.
We set out in September of 2017. There I would join a school, not so well-known in Canada or the United States, headed by the artist, Charles H. Cecil. He was a man whom I would, in time, grow to respect for the fervour in his approach to art, so rooted in the revival of the old ways, and for his refusal to adapt to standards of art education and artistry that he didn't agree with. He knew what he wanted from us and demanded it daily in the form of check-ups and weekly lectures.
There are a number of schools in Florence that have a reputation for rigorous training that include following various techniques of Old Masters. I applied to all of them, hoping my decision would reveal itself with my acceptance to one or another. But that didn't happen. Accepted by all, I found myself holding out for the Charles H. Cecil Atelier. I had been struck by the student work. There was something enigmatic about it, illuminated.
They didn't adhere to a common practice of copying Bargue drawings. Instead, their students began drawing from life. There was a wildness, a vivacity in the work at Charles Cecil’s atelier that reflected his appreciation of great painters, like Titian, Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Franz Hals—and yet it all stemmed from life, from working from life, not simply a simulacrum of it.
In the mornings we'd congregate in the large oval room upstairs at the Borgo San Frediano studio, a pinkish, grayish light spilling in from the tall windows. We'd spend a week or two drawing the figure, a man or woman, in pencil (for line), or charcoal (for value). No drawing was ever rushed and if Charles suspected us of getting restless, he'd suggest going ever slower, spending more time.
Downstairs in the afternoons, surrounded by hundreds of casts, with ceilings that reached up forever, we meticulously worked on drawing busts from the collection. Niccolo da Uzzano, Saint Jerome, Costanza, Augustus, Santa Teresa of ecstasy, we were to do them all, some twice.
Eventually, from this practice (lasting a full year and a half), the world of painting opens up. In it a lifetime worth of practice reveals itself and I felt myself succumb quite quickly to the fate of the painter.