photos from the studio

Finny working hard in a drawing class.

All students are required to study ecorche sculpture, in which they learn human anatomy by sculpting the human body showing the muscles and bones without skin. This class meets once a week all year long, and is taught by Jiwoong Cheh. Here are some photos of the current ecorche group working on the skeleton.

Hyeseung Marriage-Song

Rebecca Gray

Colleen Barry & Phillip Salamone

Angela Cunningham, Philip Salamone, & Colleen Barry

First year students are learning sculpture by working from the plaster feature casts. Here are some photos of their first sculptures being finished up.

Ken Salaz

Lauren Sansariq

Carla Crawford

Here is Ken Salaz astonishing everybody with a magic trick on a model break. (this guy is the best magician any of us have ever seen)

Repin Minoff, welcome to planet earth!

Early on Sunday, November 2nd, as daylight savings time came to an end, an hour was repeated and Repin Meyer Minoff* was born. He weighed 8 lbs., 6 oz. at birth. Congratulations Ted & Noa!

* - Repin is named after the russian painter, Ilya Efimovich Repin (1844-1930).

Nelson Shanks

Last night Nelson Shanks gave a portrait painting demonstration downstairs at the Institute of Classical Architechture & Classical America. Mr. Shanks is a well respected painter and teacher who has played a significant role in keeping realism alive over the past 40 years.

summer announcements

Two announcements for 2009 summer action:
June 8 - 12, 2009 The second annual Classical Figure Sculpture Competition. This exciting event was just covered in an article called "A Little Competition Is a Good Thing" in the nov/dec '08 issue of Fine Art Connoisseur.

June 1-26, 2009 cast & figure drawing intensive with Camie Davis, Nick Hiltner, Sam Wisneski, & Jacob Collins.

Atlanta Art Gallery group show

October 17th was the opening for a group show at the Atlanta Art Gallery: "Jacob Collins and the Water Street Atelier" featuring Jacob's work alongside that of alumni and current students of Water street and Grand Central Academy. Below is a link to an online gallery of some of the work included in the show.

Atlanta Art Gallery group show

Photos from the opening night are posted on the Portrait Society of America blog.

This review of the show came from Jerry Cullum's blog:

"The portraits in particular make one realize the importance of scale in this tradition; the photographs in the little catalogue produced by the gallery sometimes look embarrassingly inconsequential when the paintings themselves are emotion-provoking near-masterworks. When personal style is suppressed in favor of realist representational conventions, small details become crucial and the size of the image even more so. Lacking the metaphysical vigor of the Dutch precursors, these artists present a world as it might yet be, an implicit utopia that might have delighted Ernst Bloch: a sense of reverie that creates space for dreaming and thus, according to Bloch's heretical philosophic vision, for hope.

And these days we can use all the hope we can get, not to mention imaginative space in a world crowded, as Bahouth's show reveals, with conventional images. Sometimes a re-imagining of an unfashionable tradition is the most revolutionary act of all."

Student work

Here are some photos from around the studio. Now that the students from Water Street Atelier have joined the GCA community, we have people working at a range of experience levels - from beginner cast drawing to full color figure painting. Starting this week, second year students take a break from drawing to begin a new element of the curriculum spending 5 hours a day in the sculpture studio for a 2 month block.


Instructor Chris Waddell giving a portrait sculpture demo


Jason Boudreau


Colleen Barry

intro to figure sculpture with Mason Sullivan (night class)


Carol Broman


Arturo Garcia


Gregory Mortenson

Hyeseung Marriage-Song


Nancy Fletcher

Joshua LaRock

Joshua LaRock

Elisabeth Ehmann

Halloween at GCA

Yesterday we had some great costumes for Halloween, and a party with our friends downstairs at the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America.

Artists on Artists Lecture Series

Today John Morra gave a wonderful lecture and slide show about Chardin and his influence on 18th century painting. This was the fourth lecture in the Artists on Artists Lecture Series, in which real contemporary artists come talk to us about their favorite historical artists. The lectures are open to the public, and we have cookies! The next one is TBA but I'll let you know ahead of time as soon as we find out.

In September, Sean Forester gave two lectures, the first was about Greek sculpture and it's influence on painting. The second was about 19th century Russian painters. Sean is Director of Art History and Humanities at The Florence Academy of Art.













Laocoön and his sons, also known as the Laocoön Group. Marble, copy after an Hellenistic original from ca. 200 BC.

Both lectures were very interesting and I especially enjoyed the Russians because Sean had these obscure academic drawings and paintings that are nearly impossible to find unless you go to Russia yourself. I have emailed him to see if I can get some of those images for this blog.

Portrait of the painter Ivan Shishkin, by Ivan Kramskoy

Last week, Leonard Porter gave a lecture and slide show about French painter Nicholas Poussin.

Self-Portrait by Nicolas Poussin, 1650, oil on canvas, 98 x 74 cm, Louvre

Night Classes for Figure Sculpture

Night & weekend classes are offered for drawing, painting and sculpture. For more information, click HERE. To sign up, contact Justine at grandcentralacademy@gmail.com

Sarah Lamb at the Spanierman Gallery

Sarah Lamb currently has a solo exhibition at the Spanierman Gallery in New York City. Her paintings will be up from October 10 - November 8. Sarah moved to New York in 1996 in order to study with Jacob Collins at the Water Street Atelier and has also taught workshops at the Grand Central Academy of Art.*
A painter primarily of still lifes, Lamb works in the tradition of the French eighteenth-century painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, conveying the sensuous beauty of familiar, everyday objects. Her images counter the glossy seductiveness of today’s sales’ catalogues, in which there is a constant pressure to stress the fresher, more fashionable, and unfamiliar in items offered for sale, with the result that our eyes become trained to consider the known to be ugly while the new is preferred. By contrast, Lamb’s images of glossy mussels, cut prosciutto, gleaming old bottles, cream puffs, and sliced watermelon, and her attention to subtleties of light and texture, allow us to see the beauty in the mundane and relax in an enjoyment of our everyday surroundings, both natural and manufactured, appreciating their rich experiences of form and color in quiet measure.

Sarah Lamb will be teaching a 3 day still life workshop this summer from June 29-July 1. To register, email grandcentralacademy@gmail.com

*In September 2008 Grand Central Academy & The Water Street Atelier merged to create one school.