Questions
The things people ask, and the things they don’t.
Answered plainly, including the ones where the honest answer isn't the flattering one.
What this kind of training is
- What is atelier training, actually?
- A small studio where a few students work from observation every day under one or two teachers, in the tradition of the nineteenth-century academies. Not lectures and not a survey course — you draw, someone who can already do it tells you what you are getting wrong, and you do it again. The scale is the method: twelve students means the correction is specific to you.
- Why observational drawing before anything else?
- Because it trains the eye, and the eye is the bottleneck. Almost everyone can move a pencil accurately enough; what stops the drawing being right is that they cannot yet see the thing in front of them accurately. Lisa's phrase for the year's first act is learning to see, and it comes first because everything after it depends on it.
- Will this train the personality out of my work?
- That is a real risk in academic training and it is the reason the year has a third act. Learning the language comes first, but the last stretch of the year is deliberately about putting your own voice back in — using the control you now have to say something that is yours.
- Do you work from the living model?
- Yes. Drawing and sculpting from life is the center of this discipline and it is part of the adult curriculum, alongside casts, still life and the figure.
Whether it's for you
- I'm not good enough to apply.
- No previous formal training is required, and the cohort takes beginners. Curiosity, consistency and a willingness to learn are what matter most. If you could already do it you would not need the year.
- I'm too old to start.
- The adult cohort is adults. Learning to see is a trained skill rather than a young person's gift, and people who start later frequently work harder at it because they chose it deliberately.
- I have a job.
- So do most people who will be in the room. Two days a week in the studio, one class online, and a day or two at your own easel — it is built to sit beside a working life rather than replace one.
- How do I know it's right for me?
- A twenty-two-minute conversation, $44, and no obligation at the end of it. Applying does not commit you either — and not everyone is accepted, so the conversation runs in both directions.
About the school
- It's a new school with no alumni.
- The school is new; the training is not, and neither is the partnership — Lisa and Matthew ran a school together in Santa Cruz for years before this one. Lisa spent three years at the Florence Academy of Art and took an MFA at the New York Academy of Art. Matthew is also a Florence Academy graduate, completed Studio Incamminati's four-year program in Philadelphia and stayed a fifth year on a teaching fellowship. What you are buying is their training, which already exists — go and look at the work.
- Pennsauken, New Jersey?
- That is the point. This training has never been available here. The alternative, for someone in South Jersey, is Florence, New York, or nothing — and the first two are not real options for most people with a job and a family.
- How many students are there?
- Twelve a year: six adults and six teenagers aged fourteen to seventeen, taught as separate classes at separate times. The number is not a marketing constraint, it is how much individual attention two teachers can actually give.
- What does it cost?
- The founding year is $10,400 — eight payments of $1,300, or by semester, or once for the year. Private mentorship starts at $55 for a single session, and the Tuscany residency starts at $5,500. Every price is published in full rather than quoted on request.
Still something we haven’t answered?
Ask it. The application has a box for exactly that, and it goes to Lisa and Matthew rather than to a form-handling robot.