I have been an French Expressionist artist all my life.   The first image (above) is where I was going with French Expressionism before deciding to move to Florence to pursue an impossible dream.  Look at the fauvist image on the left.  I was exploring geometry within the style of fauvism as a new form of fundamental cubism to create provocative works that also provoked the senses...  Art is expansive!  No matter what field you're in, there's always something to learn and explore.  Being an artist is much more challenging than people can ever even begin to understand, especially for people who have "regular jobs"...  Like most seriously committed artists, however, one of my life dreams has always been to study at an Academy in Florence.  To accomplish this dream, you need to dig deep and have more than just a desire.  You have to have inner strength, determination, resilience, and sheer grit to even begin to prepare for the overwhelming obstacles of what comes at you with this vision!   And once you have trained alone in the darkness and are finally are ready for the academy, the real test of your preparation just begins...

 

Getting classical training in art from the renaissance in an Italian academy is not for the faint of heart; it's a rigorous bootcamp and takes everything you have to get through it.  You have to have the mindset of a focused warrior.  I knew this going into it.  That said, studying classical Italian art in the strict academic methods of the Italian masters of the Renaissance in an Italian Academy is not something you can just do from one day to the other without serious planning.  Fortunately, I make my dreams come true because I am a "planner!"  I am not afraid to dig deep and do the hard work required either. So I spent the last few years going all the way back to the fundamentals and preparing the hard work in my studio.  It also took me 3 years on focused attention mastering the Italian language before finally becoming a fluent Italian speaker and being totally ready for living as a local in Florence and working in an academy learning classical Renaissance art in Italian only.  My best compliment is when Italians ask me where in Italy I'm from...  Anyway, below are just few examples of my studies in preparation for studying classical Italian art from the Renaissance at an academy in Florence.