Michael John Angel
Stephene Bond, c.1978. Oil on canvas, 20” x 16”. Collection of Ms Bond, location unknown. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Michael John Angel is an English-born figurative painter and teacher who lives in Florence, Italy. Born in 1946, Mr. Angel has been a steward of traditional painting for over 60 years making it his life’s work to investigate and understand the materials, techniques and processes of the painter’s craft. Emigrating to Canada in 1961 and completing a brief stint in art school, Mr. Angel’s true calling led him to travel to Italy in 1967 to meet the 20th century, Italian figurative painter, Pietro Annigoni, who acted as a gateway to understanding the working methods of the old masters. Captivated by the beauty of Florence, Mr. Angel came to call it his home, moving there permanently in March, 1989. Proving himself as a world-class painter with a particular focus on myth and allegory, Mr. Angel has painted portraits for a broad range of cliental which span across the globe. Throughout his life, Mr. Angel has developed a reputation for being a passionate and widely popular teacher, teaching in multiple institutions in the United States, as well as in Canada, Britain, Rome and Florence. From 1982-1996, he directed Michael John Angel Studios in Toronto, Canada. Subsequentially, between 1992-1995 he co-directed the Florence Academy of Art, before opening his own art school in Florence during 1997, the Angel Academy of Art, which has today become one of the most prestigious academies in the world to teach traditional painting. This interview took place between Mr. Angel and Emilio Longo via email correspondence between April, 2020 and October, 2024.
You were born in England in 1946. As a way of understanding what planted the seed within you for a deep respect and admiration for classical art, can you provide information on your childhood and the cultural milieu in which you were raised?
I was born in Salford, which is a working-class township and part of Greater Manchester (imagine a mix between Coronation Street and Peaky Blinders, but with a lot less violence). I was brought up by my grandparents, who were hard workers and extremely ethical, upright people (as many of the British working class were). My grandmother’s name was Freda Hulmes, and my great-grandmother was Alice Fairley. My granddad was Charlie Hulmes. I was Mike Hulmes back then, until I was adopted by my first stepfather, Freddy Angel, when I was about 11. We had very little money; it was immediately after the War. My granddad was a lorry driver and used to take me with him on his “long” runs (approximately 30 kilometres long) to deliver materials to various factories. He was a confirmed Socialist and used to teach me about Marxism and the Rights of the People, rights that I believe in to this day. They were extremely loving to me, and I felt very secure. Coincidentally, the name of my first stepfather, who was born in Austria, was Friedrich Engels before he anglicised it to Freddy Angel (Fredrich Engels, who lived in Manchester, co-wrote The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx).
On the other hand, my mum and her sister were a couple of babes who ran around with the American G.I.s stationed in Manchester. They didn’t live with us and used to come and take me out to the cinema and to night clubs, where I would sit with my lemonade and watch all the Americans, dancing and drinking with their various gals. The Americans were disliked by the British men; the Yanks had all the money, the chocolate and the nylons—the Brits didn’t stand a chance with the ladies (“The Yanks are oversexed, overpaid and over here”). I have some great memories of times on the American air bases, sitting in the big 1950s convertibles and gazing in wonderment at the fighter planes and bombers. My mum had just turned 17 when I was born (her sister, my Auntie Do—pronounced as doe—was 15); my biological father was an American soldier whom I never met (nor was I at all curious about him—it wasn’t a big deal to us).
One thing led to another, and the sisters were soon involved with a bunch of criminals (wide-boys, we used to call them back then). My mum fell in love with a Canadian merchant seaman, Fred Angel (he was chief steward on his ship); they eventually married when I was 10, and he adopted me (hence my surname). They bought a big house in Manchester, and I moved in with them (I had lived with my grandparents up until then). I remember walking into a room in the house and finding it full of cartons of cigarettes—someone had knocked off a warehouse the night before. We would visit various courtesy “uncles” who ran stalls in various markets—it was only later, when I was an adult, that I realised that all the stuff for sale in the markets must have been stolen! My most famous “uncle” was Alfie Hinds, and my Auntie Do had a long-standing live-in love affair for years with Uncle Alfie’s wife Mary, while Alfie was in prison, or on the lam. Fred Angel died in prison when I was 14, and my mum was devastated—she really loved him. It was then that she decided that she and I should leave England and move to Canada.
As for my schooling, from age 6 to 10, I attended a private school, Saxonholme, which was run by two “old” ladies (they were probably in their 40s), who had a ton of dogs. I vividly remember learning my times-tables, which were being written on the blackboard, while one of the dogs was sprawled over my feet. The other dogs were with some of the other kids. It was lovely. When I was 11, I went into grammar school, with gowned teachers (referred to as masters—we would have to stand up when they entered the classroom). There was a lot of being strapped on the hand, and occasionally fiddled with in the bathrooms by the prefects (in the true English upper-class tradition!).
All my family were always great readers (I’m the only one of us left alive—my mum died about five years ago, aged 90), and I grew up reading comic books, before graduating to novels. As a kid I used to draw pages of comic-book storyboards (although I didn’t know that that’s what they are called)—mostly Westerns. I almost died from the Asian flu in the late 1950s—our doctor came to the house and gave me an injection, which saved me. I mention this because he gave me my first history book, Desperate Men: The True Story of Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, and The Wild Bunch. This is what got me started reading history. My family’s only link with the arts was my grandfather’s father, who was a silversmith. I met him once and have only the vaguest memory of him. I remember my great-grandmother (on my grandmother’s side), because she lived with us in the house in Manchester for some years. I never really saw a painting until I was in my teens.
I was born in Salford, which is a working-class township and part of Greater Manchester (imagine a mix between Coronation Street and Peaky Blinders, but with a lot less violence). I was brought up by my grandparents, who were hard workers and extremely ethical, upright people (as many of the British working class were). My grandmother’s name was Freda Hulmes, and my great-grandmother was Alice Fairley. My granddad was Charlie Hulmes. I was Mike Hulmes back then, until I was adopted by my first stepfather, Freddy Angel, when I was about 11. We had very little money; it was immediately after the War. My granddad was a lorry driver and used to take me with him on his “long” runs (approximately 30 kilometres long) to deliver materials to various factories. He was a confirmed Socialist and used to teach me about Marxism and the Rights of the People, rights that I believe in to this day. They were extremely loving to me, and I felt very secure. Coincidentally, the name of my first stepfather, who was born in Austria, was Friedrich Engels before he anglicised it to Freddy Angel (Fredrich Engels, who lived in Manchester, co-wrote The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx).
On the other hand, my mum and her sister were a couple of babes who ran around with the American G.I.s stationed in Manchester. They didn’t live with us and used to come and take me out to the cinema and to night clubs, where I would sit with my lemonade and watch all the Americans, dancing and drinking with their various gals. The Americans were disliked by the British men; the Yanks had all the money, the chocolate and the nylons—the Brits didn’t stand a chance with the ladies (“The Yanks are oversexed, overpaid and over here”). I have some great memories of times on the American air bases, sitting in the big 1950s convertibles and gazing in wonderment at the fighter planes and bombers. My mum had just turned 17 when I was born (her sister, my Auntie Do—pronounced as doe—was 15); my biological father was an American soldier whom I never met (nor was I at all curious about him—it wasn’t a big deal to us).
One thing led to another, and the sisters were soon involved with a bunch of criminals (wide-boys, we used to call them back then). My mum fell in love with a Canadian merchant seaman, Fred Angel (he was chief steward on his ship); they eventually married when I was 10, and he adopted me (hence my surname). They bought a big house in Manchester, and I moved in with them (I had lived with my grandparents up until then). I remember walking into a room in the house and finding it full of cartons of cigarettes—someone had knocked off a warehouse the night before. We would visit various courtesy “uncles” who ran stalls in various markets—it was only later, when I was an adult, that I realised that all the stuff for sale in the markets must have been stolen! My most famous “uncle” was Alfie Hinds, and my Auntie Do had a long-standing live-in love affair for years with Uncle Alfie’s wife Mary, while Alfie was in prison, or on the lam. Fred Angel died in prison when I was 14, and my mum was devastated—she really loved him. It was then that she decided that she and I should leave England and move to Canada.
As for my schooling, from age 6 to 10, I attended a private school, Saxonholme, which was run by two “old” ladies (they were probably in their 40s), who had a ton of dogs. I vividly remember learning my times-tables, which were being written on the blackboard, while one of the dogs was sprawled over my feet. The other dogs were with some of the other kids. It was lovely. When I was 11, I went into grammar school, with gowned teachers (referred to as masters—we would have to stand up when they entered the classroom). There was a lot of being strapped on the hand, and occasionally fiddled with in the bathrooms by the prefects (in the true English upper-class tradition!).
All my family were always great readers (I’m the only one of us left alive—my mum died about five years ago, aged 90), and I grew up reading comic books, before graduating to novels. As a kid I used to draw pages of comic-book storyboards (although I didn’t know that that’s what they are called)—mostly Westerns. I almost died from the Asian flu in the late 1950s—our doctor came to the house and gave me an injection, which saved me. I mention this because he gave me my first history book, Desperate Men: The True Story of Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, and The Wild Bunch. This is what got me started reading history. My family’s only link with the arts was my grandfather’s father, who was a silversmith. I met him once and have only the vaguest memory of him. I remember my great-grandmother (on my grandmother’s side), because she lived with us in the house in Manchester for some years. I never really saw a painting until I was in my teens.
Michael John Angel at age 6 with his grandmother (right) and great-grandmother (left) in Salford, Greater Manchester, ENG. 1952. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Michael John Angel at age 8 in Salford, Greater Manchester, ENG. 1954. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Michael John Angel at age 8 in Salford, Greater Manchester, ENG. 1954. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Moving into your adolescent years, I understand you begun painting and studying art more seriously in your mid-teens. Can you elaborate on these years of your life including your initial teachers, the course of training you undertook in drawing and painting, and how you begun to dialogue with the work of the European masters?
I had never been much of a scholar in grammar school, but changed that in high school in Canada (I’m not sure how—puberty’s end?). My main interest was in maths—algebra, geometry, trigonometry and number theory (these are actually art forms; they’re self-contained systems, like pictorial composition is). Erstwhile fellow classmates, visiting me at the Angel Academy of Art in recent years, have told me that they found me inspirational in art class, but I have no memory of being that. I was also good at English Literature—as I’ve mentioned all my family were avid readers, and I read everything from the classics, through most of the British standards, all the way to Who-Done-Its (which I still read).
A highly intelligent and beautiful fellow student, Mariagrazia Bulfoni, was my girlfriend and first love all the way through high school, from Grade 11 to Grade 13 (Grace died while I was in Italy—she was involved with drugs in university and fell from an 11th-floor student-residence window; a friend showed me the newspaper article after I’d returned to Canada). In Grade 13, I was class president. Pretty well as soon as I landed in Canada (I had just turned 15), I stumbled across a tiny black-&-white reproduction of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in an encyclopedia. I was gobsmacked! I had no idea such a thing existed! During this time, my mum married an awful guy, an ex-master sergeant from the American army, one of whose hobbies was trying to kill me while he was drunk (which was often). Needless to say, I didn’t live at home because of this—I shared an apartment with two school mates; my mum paid my share of the rent while I was still in high school. I owe her a huge amount. I could tell you a ton of stories about my fights with my mum’s then husband, Bob Fournier (who has been dead a long time now, may God rot his soul!). Speaking of fights, I didn’t mention my being in jail overnight, twice, for street fighting when I was a lad in Manchester. The police were lovely back then, they brought us cups of tea in the morning, before letting us go. My last fight was about 20 years ago with two policemen in Rome. (An acquaintance of mine calls it the Caravaggio gene!).
After high school, I went to Ontario College of Art (now Ontario College of Art & Design University, OCAD) but left after four or five weeks; if this was what art was about, I wasn’t interested. I did a brief stint in the army, and also acted in several plays in a semi-professional theatre group. Pietro Annigoni used to say that there is only one art, but it has many forms, and one of the things I carry with me from my theatre days is that an artist (the actor) has to have two contradictory things in mind at the same time; immerse yourself in the character, but never forget that you’re acting. The artist’s job is to communicate to the viewer; immerse yourself in the subject matter, but never forget you’re designing and therefore manipulating reality!
I met the Canadian artist Timothy Phillips because of a newspaper article about him in The Globe and Mail (the Canadian national newspaper), which my mum showed to me. I went to see him; I had never met anyone like him! He had studied under Augustus John when he (Tim) was a boy, then studied for eight years under Salvador Dalì and, finally, studied for a couple of years under Annigoni. He had read Racine and Molière in the original and used to talk about artists I had never heard of. I would visit him often, but I never studied under him. Around this time, my mum came across some paintings by Andrew Wyeth in a magazine article. Wow! How could such painting be possible? Remember that back then—the first half of the 1960s—nobody had even heard of Bouguereau, Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Bonnat, Dagnan-Bouveret, Delaroche or Cabanel. Raphael was the closest thing to Realism that we had seen at that point.
Grace and I had split up after high school, and I was pretty low for several years. She had interested me in the arts and in Italy. At a certain point, I decided to go to Italy to explore medieval and Renaissance studies at the University of Perugia. My best friend’s older sister (a doctor) paid for my flight and gave me $50 (which was a lot of money in Italy, back then), and away I went. Tim Phillips had given me a letter of introduction to Annigoni (whom I had known about since his first portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in 1955), and my mum said she would pay my rent. This was in 1967, and I was 21.
I drew a lot more during my early teenage years in Manchester than I may have led you to believe. I mentioned previously that I drew pages of made-up comic books (drew them, not copied them) for myself—not to show around—but I also took loads of how-to-draw books out of the library. These were written by British academy-trained artists (this was the 1950s, remember, and some of them were still alive). I wish I could remember their names and/or the titles of the books—I would love to look at them again. One landscape draftsman was Adrian-someone (impossible to Google!). He had a program on the BBC (in the black-and-white-TV days).
I had never been much of a scholar in grammar school, but changed that in high school in Canada (I’m not sure how—puberty’s end?). My main interest was in maths—algebra, geometry, trigonometry and number theory (these are actually art forms; they’re self-contained systems, like pictorial composition is). Erstwhile fellow classmates, visiting me at the Angel Academy of Art in recent years, have told me that they found me inspirational in art class, but I have no memory of being that. I was also good at English Literature—as I’ve mentioned all my family were avid readers, and I read everything from the classics, through most of the British standards, all the way to Who-Done-Its (which I still read).
A highly intelligent and beautiful fellow student, Mariagrazia Bulfoni, was my girlfriend and first love all the way through high school, from Grade 11 to Grade 13 (Grace died while I was in Italy—she was involved with drugs in university and fell from an 11th-floor student-residence window; a friend showed me the newspaper article after I’d returned to Canada). In Grade 13, I was class president. Pretty well as soon as I landed in Canada (I had just turned 15), I stumbled across a tiny black-&-white reproduction of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in an encyclopedia. I was gobsmacked! I had no idea such a thing existed! During this time, my mum married an awful guy, an ex-master sergeant from the American army, one of whose hobbies was trying to kill me while he was drunk (which was often). Needless to say, I didn’t live at home because of this—I shared an apartment with two school mates; my mum paid my share of the rent while I was still in high school. I owe her a huge amount. I could tell you a ton of stories about my fights with my mum’s then husband, Bob Fournier (who has been dead a long time now, may God rot his soul!). Speaking of fights, I didn’t mention my being in jail overnight, twice, for street fighting when I was a lad in Manchester. The police were lovely back then, they brought us cups of tea in the morning, before letting us go. My last fight was about 20 years ago with two policemen in Rome. (An acquaintance of mine calls it the Caravaggio gene!).
After high school, I went to Ontario College of Art (now Ontario College of Art & Design University, OCAD) but left after four or five weeks; if this was what art was about, I wasn’t interested. I did a brief stint in the army, and also acted in several plays in a semi-professional theatre group. Pietro Annigoni used to say that there is only one art, but it has many forms, and one of the things I carry with me from my theatre days is that an artist (the actor) has to have two contradictory things in mind at the same time; immerse yourself in the character, but never forget that you’re acting. The artist’s job is to communicate to the viewer; immerse yourself in the subject matter, but never forget you’re designing and therefore manipulating reality!
I met the Canadian artist Timothy Phillips because of a newspaper article about him in The Globe and Mail (the Canadian national newspaper), which my mum showed to me. I went to see him; I had never met anyone like him! He had studied under Augustus John when he (Tim) was a boy, then studied for eight years under Salvador Dalì and, finally, studied for a couple of years under Annigoni. He had read Racine and Molière in the original and used to talk about artists I had never heard of. I would visit him often, but I never studied under him. Around this time, my mum came across some paintings by Andrew Wyeth in a magazine article. Wow! How could such painting be possible? Remember that back then—the first half of the 1960s—nobody had even heard of Bouguereau, Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Bonnat, Dagnan-Bouveret, Delaroche or Cabanel. Raphael was the closest thing to Realism that we had seen at that point.
Grace and I had split up after high school, and I was pretty low for several years. She had interested me in the arts and in Italy. At a certain point, I decided to go to Italy to explore medieval and Renaissance studies at the University of Perugia. My best friend’s older sister (a doctor) paid for my flight and gave me $50 (which was a lot of money in Italy, back then), and away I went. Tim Phillips had given me a letter of introduction to Annigoni (whom I had known about since his first portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in 1955), and my mum said she would pay my rent. This was in 1967, and I was 21.
I drew a lot more during my early teenage years in Manchester than I may have led you to believe. I mentioned previously that I drew pages of made-up comic books (drew them, not copied them) for myself—not to show around—but I also took loads of how-to-draw books out of the library. These were written by British academy-trained artists (this was the 1950s, remember, and some of them were still alive). I wish I could remember their names and/or the titles of the books—I would love to look at them again. One landscape draftsman was Adrian-someone (impossible to Google!). He had a program on the BBC (in the black-and-white-TV days).
Mariagrazia Bulfoni, Mr. Angel’s high school love. c.1956. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Michael John Angel during his first year in Toronto, CN, at age 17 with Mariagrazia Bulfoni. 1963. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Michael John Angel during his first year in Toronto, CN, at age 17 with Mariagrazia Bulfoni. 1963. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
How did you initially come across Pietro Annigoni’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and what impact did it have on you?
There was some television coverage about Annigoni’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II after it was painted. I’m afraid I had no knowledge of the portrait back then. I was 10. (I mentioned previously, that I wasn’t a total yahoo as a teenager in England. I used to get how-to-draw books, written by the still living academicians, out of the library and draw from them.) In 1967, the letter of introduction to Annigoni was Tim Phillips’s idea, after I had told him I was going to university in Perugia. (“You must go up to Florence and see the maestro!”).
There was some television coverage about Annigoni’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II after it was painted. I’m afraid I had no knowledge of the portrait back then. I was 10. (I mentioned previously, that I wasn’t a total yahoo as a teenager in England. I used to get how-to-draw books, written by the still living academicians, out of the library and draw from them.) In 1967, the letter of introduction to Annigoni was Tim Phillips’s idea, after I had told him I was going to university in Perugia. (“You must go up to Florence and see the maestro!”).
Pietro Annigoni, Queen Elizabeth II, 1954-1955. Oil tempera on paper lined board, 60” x 40”. Collection of Worshipful Company of Fishmongers’, London. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Arriving in Perugia, Italy in 1967 as a 21-year-old young man must have been incredibly inspiring for you. What was your initial reaction when you arrived there and started to develop a sense of the people, art and culture?
I fell in love with Italy from the very first day; the beauty of the countryside (I had never seen such countryside before—my granddad’s lorry always travelled within townships), the food at the student mensa (I love eating), the old buildings, the statues and fountains on the streets and the Romance of being in such a famous historical town.
My routine was breakfast in the student mensa (I roomed in the university’s student lodgings), classes in Italian and Italian culture, dinner, drinks and parties with fellow students—just normal stuff. There were no Realist artists back then (or none visible—I know now that there were lots of them scattered about the world; it’s just that the Art Establishment kept quiet about them). Artists, then and now, were mostly enamoured of themselves, mesmerised by their own “genius” and created boring rubbish. Their heroes were Pablo Big-arse-hole and the darlings of the Art Establishment. I stayed in Perugia for about a month before going to Florence to meet Annigoni. I dropped out of the university and moved to Florence pretty well right after that.
1967 is the year that you met Pietro Annigoni. Can you recollect the first time you saw him and what the nature of your conversation was?
I vividly remember going to see Annigoni in his studio with some (awful, I’m sure) drawings and my letter from Tim Phillips. In the film, Annigoni: Portrait of an Artist, I tell the story of this meeting. Annigoni told me about Nerina Simi’s atelier, but I said that I wanted to study under him—that I had never seen a real artist before. He told me that they were painting a fresco in a small town, Ponte Buggianese; would I like to join them? Naturally, I said, “yes.” But after having accepted, I became really shy and said, “are you sure I won’t get in the way?” He looked at me and said, “well, if you do, I’ll kill you.” He almost did kill me once, when he threw me off the scaffolding. We were only about a metre and a half above the ground, but, man, it hurt when I landed! (I’ll provide more details about this incident later). The good old days, when maestros were maestros!
As a side note, like Annigoni, I’m a cynic (I mean this in the modern, not in the classical, sense). Things always look darkest before they go pitch black. Behind every silver lining there’s a cloud. The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. Annigoni’s English was excellent, and fairly heavily accented. The late Sonia Bata (who founded and ran the Bata Shoe Company) once said that Annigoni was really sexy! She was one of his many lovers; Annigoni was a real donnaiolo (and a real drinker).
With the opportunity to assist with the fresco, I went by myself to this first meeting, and was very nervous, but two other people were in the studio; Riccardo Noferi (Annigoni’s oldest friend and his business manager/secretary—Riccardo died in the car crash in which Annigoni lost an ear) and Annibale, who did all the housework. The maestro was wearing his usual old brown corduroy jacket that zipped up the front, no shirt and his baggy grey trousers. He was a bohemian who disliked the moronic upper classes (for whom he worked, of course!). He was awe-inspiring and not a little intimidating. His presence filled the room. And yes, he took all his “students” on for free. There was no instruction, it was on-the-job training. Sometimes, I would be told to sit in a corner to draw a still life or something; the maestro would come by once in a long while and take a look, offering some brief feedback. He “taught” by example in the times he would let me/us watch him work.
I understand during the 1960s, many aspiring artists travelled to Italy in search of Annigoni for training due to the obsolescence of academic art training in the West. Many beginning students who would approach Annigoni that were desperate to be taken on as apprentices would often get rejected as he didn’t want to bother with beginners. Therefore, he would send them to a fellow artist across town named Nerina Semi, who ran a small teaching studio called “Studio Simi,” which you have explained. Nerina was the daughter of Filadelfo Simi, who had trained with Jean Leon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris during the 19th century. She also had a brother that was a painter by the name of Renzo Simi. Did you meet any of the Simi family while you were in Italy and what is your opinion of the degree to which the Simi’s helped keep the tradition of Classical painting alive in the 20th century?
As I stated previously, the maestro first said that I should study under Nerina Simi (she was always referred to as la Signorina), but I asked to study directly under him. Annigoni was very close to Renzo Simi when they were young, but they had a falling out and never spoke again. I don’t know what it was about; it was never mentioned. (Renzo was an amateur painter, by the way, not a professional. I don’t know what he did for a living—I think he might have been a teacher of Italian literature; he is referred to as un letterato, for which there is no real English equivalent—scholar? Intellectual? A well-read person? An art critic?). Italian and English are difficult bedfellows. Those of us who studied under Annigoni are known as allievi, which means “disciples” and is hardly appropriate! Annigoni could be pretty violent and not at all Christ-like. We are also known, rather disparagingly, as the Annigonini.
An interesting fact; there is no word in Italian for “privacy”—interesting, yes? An incident is un accidente, while an accident is un incidente. I remember coming into school after lunch one day, 25 years ago, and seeing what marvellous work our Italian students had been doing. “Tremendo!” I yelled intending to say ‘tremendous,’ ‘fabulous,’ ‘marvellous,’ or ‘well done!’—And their faces fell. (Tremendo means “awful.” But you probably know all this).
In Florence, I used to hang out with several of Simi’s students—wine was cheap, and we would gather in Nick Caracciolo’s studio and talk about art. Nick died about 30 years ago in a car accident. He could draw like an angel (no pun intended). I also used to run around a bit with Richard Maury at this time. Both of us were much enamoured of women (for all the politically incorrect reasons, these days) and we used to go to the Red Garter and pick up the (scantily dressed) British and American gals. Richard died a year ago, as I’m sure you know. He was a great painter—looking at his paintings, one has no sense of the picture plane; the illusion is that of one simply looking into open space—but, back then, he couldn’t sell a painting to save his life. Realism was completely unfashionable. I have a tonne of stories about Richard—he was really intelligent and a real rascal, a can of worms. Even though Richard couldn’t sell a painting back in the 1960s as Realism was completely out of vogue in the art market, he eventually sold his paintings for up to $100,000 in his final decades, as the art market changed.
Coming back to Simi; she was a tough teacher. I studied there for a brief time, on and off, but really had no money to pay her fees (unlike Annigoni, she would not teach for free). I should stress that she taught the traditional way, and did not use Sight-Size (I doubt that she had even heard of it). Sight-Size was never taught in the academies or the ateliers; it just teaches students how to copy, it doesn’t teach them how to draw. She taught comparative measurement, but without enough emphasis on gesture (in my now mature opinion).
Can you explain more about your training with Annigoni and your experience in assisting him in painting the fresco at Ponte Buggianese, as I understand an incident occurred while you were working with him on the scaffolding?
The training under the maestro was very informal—it was really on-the-job training. He didn’t run a school. When I was in the studio—which was by no means every day—I would watch him paint and try to understand what he was doing and why. The same was true when we were painting the fresco in Ponte Buggianese (Deposition and Resurrection of Christ). Every so often, he had me sit in an alcove in the studio and try to draw a simple still life, or a self-portrait, using a mirror. He would come by once in a while and say, “Yes, it’s very nice, but you could carry it further.” He never told me how to do that, though.
In Ponte Buggianese, I would help by the putting of pinholes in the cartoons, for transfer onto the wet plaster, or running around doing one odd job or another. Mostly, I just watched him paint. The figuring out of how the old people painted came later, after I had returned to Canada, having spent more than 3 years in Italy. Annigoni was away a lot; he was a great traveller—walking all over Italy when he was younger (Florence to Milan, for instance, sleeping rough, under the trees). He was also away to paint portraits—the Shah and Farah Diba of Iran, or his second 1969 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II (Her Majesty in Robes of the British Empire), and others. Most of Annigoni’s assistants were with him for decades; Fernando Bernardini, Annigoni’s chief assistant who was a lovely man (“Nando,” as we called him) he was married to a painter named Giovanna Bernardini, I can’t remember her maiden name, which is what she would actually be known by (women in Italy keep their maiden name after marriage), Silvestro Pistolese (a very successful painter and long-time assistant to the maestro who passed away in early 2023) and Romano Stefanelli. Ben Long, the American painter, was with Annigoni for 8 years, but joined him after I had left—Ben and I didn’t meet until years later, in Venice.
Please remember that Annigoni was my maestro, not a friend. We didn’t sit around together for a chinwag. Whenever we were in Ponte Buggianese—we were there only sporadically (Annigoni was out of the country a lot, as explained previously)—we would all pile into a couple of cars and drive somewhere for a boozy lunch. Annigoni would chat with his friends (in Italian), and I would listen in as best I could (my Italian was not good back then—Annigoni always spoke to me in his excellent English). In the studio in Florence, Annigoni would receive visitors in the mornings—people came from all over the world. Annigoni was absolutely not a virtuous man. He was an adulterer, a boozer, very conceited, a prima-donna and occasionally violent. He was also kind and extremely generous. I adored him.
In fresco, he used both buon fresco and secco. The frescoes, once dry, were often carried further, using egg tempera. Mixing the tempera for the fresco was one of my jobs. One doesn’t grind pigments for either tempera or for fresco. The pigments are simply mixed with a liquid using a palette knife. The recipe was “secret,” but now it’s well published. I added the codicil that we used copal varnish (a hard varnish), not mastic (a soft varnish that yellows a lot over time). In fact, in Luciano Pelizzari’s book that was published in 1991, Pietro Annigoni: Il Periodo Inglese, 1949 – 1971, the chart on page 283 identifies the varnish used in Annigoni’s tempera grassa recipe as mastic, but back then the maestro used copal varnish. Annigoni’s technique is described as a step-by-step in an American Artist magazine from the 1970s. It’s good that they did this, but it’s badly written; one can only understand it if one already knows how it’s done.
When Annigoni worked, he smoked a lot. He would break the cigarette in half and insert one half into his cigarette holder. That way, he could smoke it all the way down. He wouldn’t talk much, but neither was he silent. He used to drink a serious amount of red wine; he was a real boozer. Annigoni’s idea of a drinking problem was an empty glass. (Mine too, until I stopped drinking about a year ago!). As mentioned previously, he was violent at times (the Caravaggio gene). Long before my time, an assistant brought him a book with a reproduction of one of Pablo Picasso’s early paintings in it, saying, “Maestro, look! Picasso could draw!” Annigoni picked the guy up by his collar and his belt and threw him down 16 stone stairs! Annigoni used to fire his old army pistol out of train windows, while the train was moving. Before the war, when the Fascists would give speeches in Piazza Santa Croce under Annigoni’s studio windows, the maestro and his friends would go onto the roof with their fencing foils and kick bits of roofing tiles down onto the Fascists. When the Fascists ran up, they would say that they were unaware and were sorry, they were just playing with the swords!
As for the incident of me being thrown off the scaffolding, one morning when Annigoni was about to start the day’s work on the fresco (la giornata, it’s called—the day’s area to be painted), Nando Bernardini (Annigoni’s head of studio) wasn’t around to get everything in place. Exasperated, Annigoni said, “But where is Nando?” And told me to bring him some white paint. I had read that titanium white is good in fresco, but I didn’t know that it was only good in tiny bits; the highlight in an eye or on a nose, for instance. I gave Annigoni a bowl of titanium white (in the bowl, all whites look pretty much the same), and Annigoni painted it over the area to be painted that day (fresco is really just a big watercolour and needs a white base so that you can see what the colour you’re painting onto it looks like—by itself, the wet plaster is a dirty warm grey colour that gets whiter as the day goes on). We stood back and watched the whole area turn streaky, “That’s not white,” Annigoni said, and I thought, “Oh Christ, what have I done?” When I explained what had happened, he was beside himself. He picked me up and threw me away. I landed on the marble floor of the church (God, that hurt!), and Annigoni went storming out. The scaffolding was only a metre or so above the ground, but I’m sure he would have done it even if we were 8 metres up! We then had to find the plasterer, remove the ruined plaster and start the day’s work again. Nando was Annigoni’s head of studio for 45 years. He was the most eccentric person I have ever met—Annigoni once said to me, “That man has a very strange destiny.” I could tell you a zillion stories about Nando; he was a lovely man, from whom I learned a lot.
We used the same cartoon for the figure of Christ in the Ponte Buggianese fresco that Annigoni had used for Christ in the San Marco frescoes in 1939. The model was a young 33-year-old Sicilian man who had died in a motorcycle accident just outside of Florence. He had no near relatives, and the other relatives didn’t want to pay for the body being shipped back to Sicily; so, the Florentine Comune had to pay for the funeral. Annigoni heard about this, went to the morgue and said, “Yoho, I’m Pietro Annigoni and I’m painting a fresco in the monastery of San Marco. Can I borrow the body?” And they loaned it to him! He had it strung up in his studio for a few days while he made the drawing that was used as a model for the frescoes. This happened before even I was born (if you can imagine that!), and it is now 50 years since I first heard about it. Was it true? I asked Benedetto, Annigoni’s son, about it 25 years ago, and he said yes, it’s true! Florence was very different then than it is now. I recall several occasions when we were having lunch in Ponte Buggianese—people came from all over the world to have lunch with the maestro. I would sit on one end of the table and Annigoni sat on the other end. All the bottles of wine seemed to end up on his end! As a side note, it’s important to mention that everybody in the Annigoni family is dead, including the recent death of the maestro’s wife, Rosella Segreto Annigoni, who passed in April, 2024.
I fell in love with Italy from the very first day; the beauty of the countryside (I had never seen such countryside before—my granddad’s lorry always travelled within townships), the food at the student mensa (I love eating), the old buildings, the statues and fountains on the streets and the Romance of being in such a famous historical town.
My routine was breakfast in the student mensa (I roomed in the university’s student lodgings), classes in Italian and Italian culture, dinner, drinks and parties with fellow students—just normal stuff. There were no Realist artists back then (or none visible—I know now that there were lots of them scattered about the world; it’s just that the Art Establishment kept quiet about them). Artists, then and now, were mostly enamoured of themselves, mesmerised by their own “genius” and created boring rubbish. Their heroes were Pablo Big-arse-hole and the darlings of the Art Establishment. I stayed in Perugia for about a month before going to Florence to meet Annigoni. I dropped out of the university and moved to Florence pretty well right after that.
1967 is the year that you met Pietro Annigoni. Can you recollect the first time you saw him and what the nature of your conversation was?
I vividly remember going to see Annigoni in his studio with some (awful, I’m sure) drawings and my letter from Tim Phillips. In the film, Annigoni: Portrait of an Artist, I tell the story of this meeting. Annigoni told me about Nerina Simi’s atelier, but I said that I wanted to study under him—that I had never seen a real artist before. He told me that they were painting a fresco in a small town, Ponte Buggianese; would I like to join them? Naturally, I said, “yes.” But after having accepted, I became really shy and said, “are you sure I won’t get in the way?” He looked at me and said, “well, if you do, I’ll kill you.” He almost did kill me once, when he threw me off the scaffolding. We were only about a metre and a half above the ground, but, man, it hurt when I landed! (I’ll provide more details about this incident later). The good old days, when maestros were maestros!
As a side note, like Annigoni, I’m a cynic (I mean this in the modern, not in the classical, sense). Things always look darkest before they go pitch black. Behind every silver lining there’s a cloud. The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. Annigoni’s English was excellent, and fairly heavily accented. The late Sonia Bata (who founded and ran the Bata Shoe Company) once said that Annigoni was really sexy! She was one of his many lovers; Annigoni was a real donnaiolo (and a real drinker).
With the opportunity to assist with the fresco, I went by myself to this first meeting, and was very nervous, but two other people were in the studio; Riccardo Noferi (Annigoni’s oldest friend and his business manager/secretary—Riccardo died in the car crash in which Annigoni lost an ear) and Annibale, who did all the housework. The maestro was wearing his usual old brown corduroy jacket that zipped up the front, no shirt and his baggy grey trousers. He was a bohemian who disliked the moronic upper classes (for whom he worked, of course!). He was awe-inspiring and not a little intimidating. His presence filled the room. And yes, he took all his “students” on for free. There was no instruction, it was on-the-job training. Sometimes, I would be told to sit in a corner to draw a still life or something; the maestro would come by once in a long while and take a look, offering some brief feedback. He “taught” by example in the times he would let me/us watch him work.
I understand during the 1960s, many aspiring artists travelled to Italy in search of Annigoni for training due to the obsolescence of academic art training in the West. Many beginning students who would approach Annigoni that were desperate to be taken on as apprentices would often get rejected as he didn’t want to bother with beginners. Therefore, he would send them to a fellow artist across town named Nerina Semi, who ran a small teaching studio called “Studio Simi,” which you have explained. Nerina was the daughter of Filadelfo Simi, who had trained with Jean Leon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris during the 19th century. She also had a brother that was a painter by the name of Renzo Simi. Did you meet any of the Simi family while you were in Italy and what is your opinion of the degree to which the Simi’s helped keep the tradition of Classical painting alive in the 20th century?
As I stated previously, the maestro first said that I should study under Nerina Simi (she was always referred to as la Signorina), but I asked to study directly under him. Annigoni was very close to Renzo Simi when they were young, but they had a falling out and never spoke again. I don’t know what it was about; it was never mentioned. (Renzo was an amateur painter, by the way, not a professional. I don’t know what he did for a living—I think he might have been a teacher of Italian literature; he is referred to as un letterato, for which there is no real English equivalent—scholar? Intellectual? A well-read person? An art critic?). Italian and English are difficult bedfellows. Those of us who studied under Annigoni are known as allievi, which means “disciples” and is hardly appropriate! Annigoni could be pretty violent and not at all Christ-like. We are also known, rather disparagingly, as the Annigonini.
An interesting fact; there is no word in Italian for “privacy”—interesting, yes? An incident is un accidente, while an accident is un incidente. I remember coming into school after lunch one day, 25 years ago, and seeing what marvellous work our Italian students had been doing. “Tremendo!” I yelled intending to say ‘tremendous,’ ‘fabulous,’ ‘marvellous,’ or ‘well done!’—And their faces fell. (Tremendo means “awful.” But you probably know all this).
In Florence, I used to hang out with several of Simi’s students—wine was cheap, and we would gather in Nick Caracciolo’s studio and talk about art. Nick died about 30 years ago in a car accident. He could draw like an angel (no pun intended). I also used to run around a bit with Richard Maury at this time. Both of us were much enamoured of women (for all the politically incorrect reasons, these days) and we used to go to the Red Garter and pick up the (scantily dressed) British and American gals. Richard died a year ago, as I’m sure you know. He was a great painter—looking at his paintings, one has no sense of the picture plane; the illusion is that of one simply looking into open space—but, back then, he couldn’t sell a painting to save his life. Realism was completely unfashionable. I have a tonne of stories about Richard—he was really intelligent and a real rascal, a can of worms. Even though Richard couldn’t sell a painting back in the 1960s as Realism was completely out of vogue in the art market, he eventually sold his paintings for up to $100,000 in his final decades, as the art market changed.
Coming back to Simi; she was a tough teacher. I studied there for a brief time, on and off, but really had no money to pay her fees (unlike Annigoni, she would not teach for free). I should stress that she taught the traditional way, and did not use Sight-Size (I doubt that she had even heard of it). Sight-Size was never taught in the academies or the ateliers; it just teaches students how to copy, it doesn’t teach them how to draw. She taught comparative measurement, but without enough emphasis on gesture (in my now mature opinion).
Can you explain more about your training with Annigoni and your experience in assisting him in painting the fresco at Ponte Buggianese, as I understand an incident occurred while you were working with him on the scaffolding?
The training under the maestro was very informal—it was really on-the-job training. He didn’t run a school. When I was in the studio—which was by no means every day—I would watch him paint and try to understand what he was doing and why. The same was true when we were painting the fresco in Ponte Buggianese (Deposition and Resurrection of Christ). Every so often, he had me sit in an alcove in the studio and try to draw a simple still life, or a self-portrait, using a mirror. He would come by once in a while and say, “Yes, it’s very nice, but you could carry it further.” He never told me how to do that, though.
In Ponte Buggianese, I would help by the putting of pinholes in the cartoons, for transfer onto the wet plaster, or running around doing one odd job or another. Mostly, I just watched him paint. The figuring out of how the old people painted came later, after I had returned to Canada, having spent more than 3 years in Italy. Annigoni was away a lot; he was a great traveller—walking all over Italy when he was younger (Florence to Milan, for instance, sleeping rough, under the trees). He was also away to paint portraits—the Shah and Farah Diba of Iran, or his second 1969 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II (Her Majesty in Robes of the British Empire), and others. Most of Annigoni’s assistants were with him for decades; Fernando Bernardini, Annigoni’s chief assistant who was a lovely man (“Nando,” as we called him) he was married to a painter named Giovanna Bernardini, I can’t remember her maiden name, which is what she would actually be known by (women in Italy keep their maiden name after marriage), Silvestro Pistolese (a very successful painter and long-time assistant to the maestro who passed away in early 2023) and Romano Stefanelli. Ben Long, the American painter, was with Annigoni for 8 years, but joined him after I had left—Ben and I didn’t meet until years later, in Venice.
Please remember that Annigoni was my maestro, not a friend. We didn’t sit around together for a chinwag. Whenever we were in Ponte Buggianese—we were there only sporadically (Annigoni was out of the country a lot, as explained previously)—we would all pile into a couple of cars and drive somewhere for a boozy lunch. Annigoni would chat with his friends (in Italian), and I would listen in as best I could (my Italian was not good back then—Annigoni always spoke to me in his excellent English). In the studio in Florence, Annigoni would receive visitors in the mornings—people came from all over the world. Annigoni was absolutely not a virtuous man. He was an adulterer, a boozer, very conceited, a prima-donna and occasionally violent. He was also kind and extremely generous. I adored him.
In fresco, he used both buon fresco and secco. The frescoes, once dry, were often carried further, using egg tempera. Mixing the tempera for the fresco was one of my jobs. One doesn’t grind pigments for either tempera or for fresco. The pigments are simply mixed with a liquid using a palette knife. The recipe was “secret,” but now it’s well published. I added the codicil that we used copal varnish (a hard varnish), not mastic (a soft varnish that yellows a lot over time). In fact, in Luciano Pelizzari’s book that was published in 1991, Pietro Annigoni: Il Periodo Inglese, 1949 – 1971, the chart on page 283 identifies the varnish used in Annigoni’s tempera grassa recipe as mastic, but back then the maestro used copal varnish. Annigoni’s technique is described as a step-by-step in an American Artist magazine from the 1970s. It’s good that they did this, but it’s badly written; one can only understand it if one already knows how it’s done.
When Annigoni worked, he smoked a lot. He would break the cigarette in half and insert one half into his cigarette holder. That way, he could smoke it all the way down. He wouldn’t talk much, but neither was he silent. He used to drink a serious amount of red wine; he was a real boozer. Annigoni’s idea of a drinking problem was an empty glass. (Mine too, until I stopped drinking about a year ago!). As mentioned previously, he was violent at times (the Caravaggio gene). Long before my time, an assistant brought him a book with a reproduction of one of Pablo Picasso’s early paintings in it, saying, “Maestro, look! Picasso could draw!” Annigoni picked the guy up by his collar and his belt and threw him down 16 stone stairs! Annigoni used to fire his old army pistol out of train windows, while the train was moving. Before the war, when the Fascists would give speeches in Piazza Santa Croce under Annigoni’s studio windows, the maestro and his friends would go onto the roof with their fencing foils and kick bits of roofing tiles down onto the Fascists. When the Fascists ran up, they would say that they were unaware and were sorry, they were just playing with the swords!
As for the incident of me being thrown off the scaffolding, one morning when Annigoni was about to start the day’s work on the fresco (la giornata, it’s called—the day’s area to be painted), Nando Bernardini (Annigoni’s head of studio) wasn’t around to get everything in place. Exasperated, Annigoni said, “But where is Nando?” And told me to bring him some white paint. I had read that titanium white is good in fresco, but I didn’t know that it was only good in tiny bits; the highlight in an eye or on a nose, for instance. I gave Annigoni a bowl of titanium white (in the bowl, all whites look pretty much the same), and Annigoni painted it over the area to be painted that day (fresco is really just a big watercolour and needs a white base so that you can see what the colour you’re painting onto it looks like—by itself, the wet plaster is a dirty warm grey colour that gets whiter as the day goes on). We stood back and watched the whole area turn streaky, “That’s not white,” Annigoni said, and I thought, “Oh Christ, what have I done?” When I explained what had happened, he was beside himself. He picked me up and threw me away. I landed on the marble floor of the church (God, that hurt!), and Annigoni went storming out. The scaffolding was only a metre or so above the ground, but I’m sure he would have done it even if we were 8 metres up! We then had to find the plasterer, remove the ruined plaster and start the day’s work again. Nando was Annigoni’s head of studio for 45 years. He was the most eccentric person I have ever met—Annigoni once said to me, “That man has a very strange destiny.” I could tell you a zillion stories about Nando; he was a lovely man, from whom I learned a lot.
We used the same cartoon for the figure of Christ in the Ponte Buggianese fresco that Annigoni had used for Christ in the San Marco frescoes in 1939. The model was a young 33-year-old Sicilian man who had died in a motorcycle accident just outside of Florence. He had no near relatives, and the other relatives didn’t want to pay for the body being shipped back to Sicily; so, the Florentine Comune had to pay for the funeral. Annigoni heard about this, went to the morgue and said, “Yoho, I’m Pietro Annigoni and I’m painting a fresco in the monastery of San Marco. Can I borrow the body?” And they loaned it to him! He had it strung up in his studio for a few days while he made the drawing that was used as a model for the frescoes. This happened before even I was born (if you can imagine that!), and it is now 50 years since I first heard about it. Was it true? I asked Benedetto, Annigoni’s son, about it 25 years ago, and he said yes, it’s true! Florence was very different then than it is now. I recall several occasions when we were having lunch in Ponte Buggianese—people came from all over the world to have lunch with the maestro. I would sit on one end of the table and Annigoni sat on the other end. All the bottles of wine seemed to end up on his end! As a side note, it’s important to mention that everybody in the Annigoni family is dead, including the recent death of the maestro’s wife, Rosella Segreto Annigoni, who passed in April, 2024.
Pietro Annigoni, study for Deposition of Christ, Four Saints, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel (sketch for the fresco in the Convent of St. Mark, Florence, ITA), 1937-1941. Watercolour and black ink on paper, dimensions unknown. Collection unknown. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Pietro Annigoni, Deposition of Christ, Four Saints, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, 1937-1941. Fresco, 6m x 4m. Located inside of the Convent of St. Mark, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Archivio Storico, Fondazione CR Firenze, Florence, ITA.
Pietro Annigoni, Deposition of Christ (sketch for the fresco, Deposition and Resurrection of Christ),1967-1970. Charcoal on paper, 79” x 67”. Collection of Diocesi di Pescia, Pescia, ITA. Image courtesy of: Archivio Storico, Fondazione CR Firenze, Florence, ITA.
Pietro Annigoni, Deposition and Resurrection of Christ (centre panel, the figure of Christ is inspired from a fresco, Deposition of Christ, Four Saints, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, that Annigoni painted previously in the Convent of St. Mark in Florence between 1937-1941),1967-1970. Fresco, 10m x 8m. Located inside of Propositura di San Michele Arcangelo, Ponte Buggianese, Province of Pistoia, Tuscany, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Pietro Annigoni, Deposition of Christ, Four Saints, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, 1937-1941. Fresco, 6m x 4m. Located inside of the Convent of St. Mark, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Archivio Storico, Fondazione CR Firenze, Florence, ITA.
Pietro Annigoni, Deposition of Christ (sketch for the fresco, Deposition and Resurrection of Christ),1967-1970. Charcoal on paper, 79” x 67”. Collection of Diocesi di Pescia, Pescia, ITA. Image courtesy of: Archivio Storico, Fondazione CR Firenze, Florence, ITA.
Pietro Annigoni, Deposition and Resurrection of Christ (centre panel, the figure of Christ is inspired from a fresco, Deposition of Christ, Four Saints, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, that Annigoni painted previously in the Convent of St. Mark in Florence between 1937-1941),1967-1970. Fresco, 10m x 8m. Located inside of Propositura di San Michele Arcangelo, Ponte Buggianese, Province of Pistoia, Tuscany, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Annigoni was well known for using a unique painting medium called “tempera grassa” which he learnt from a Russian painter named Nikolai Lokoff. Essentially, it is a fat medium, an oil tempera, which is made from an emulsion of egg yolk, linseed oil, varnish and white wine. There have been efforts by some painters to replicate this medium; however, no one is entirely sure of the exact recipe Annigoni used and the correct proportions of the materials included. During your training with him, did Annigoni explain the medium to you, and did you get any training in working with it yourself?
Egg tempera is an ancient emulsion medium, certainly going back to early Egyptian times. There are traces of it on Egyptian sarcophagi that date from circa 1000 BC. There are literally dozens of recipes for tempera; the simplest one for egg tempera is the one Andrew Wyeth used; 1 part egg yolk to 1 part water. Annigoni used a tempera grassa, as you know; 1 whole egg and 2 extra yolks (= 1 volume), mixed thoroughly with a half volume of a 50/50 mixture of stand oil and (copal) varnish. These should be mixed together for about 20 minutes, if mixed by hand. We used an old electric blender (the modern ones are too strong and would demulsify the egg, which would definitely be counter-productive!). After that, up to one-and-a-half volumes of water is added—less is better, since one can always add more water if needed. Annigoni didn’t do this last step; he mixed his pigments with white wine, adding the aqueous ingredient in this way (the wine he preferred for his paint was a dry Lacrima Cristi—the Tears of Christ). Stored in a fridge, tempera lasts for many months (in the old days, before fridges, the tempera was kept in a large basin of river sand, which is an excellent insulator and keeps things cold). In fact, Nick Caracciolo, a brilliant student of Nerina Simi’s back in the 1960s, used to keep his tempera stored in river sand. When I asked him why he didn’t use a fridge, he said, “Well, you see man, I don’t have a fridge.” I didn’t have one either—we were all extremely poor. Tragically, Nick died in a car accident 30 years ago.
The word ‘tempera’ is usually used today to mean egg tempera, but this meaning is not implicit in the word. Tempera applies to any paint; one tempers pigments with linseed oil to create oil paints. Michelangelo used a glue tempera to complete his paintings on the Sistine Chapel ceiling—most of this has now been removed by idiot restorers who were never trained to paint, beyond a few studio courses. The word derives from the Latin distemperare—to mix thoroughly. Most painters in the past, including the Venetians, used tempera as an underpainting medium. Caravaggio used a tempera known in Tuscany as putrido (it stinks as it goes bad in the studio). The real recipe has been lost, and none of the available recipes work. The point of using putrido is that it can be applied as an impasto, but dries within 15 minutes, and can be immediately painted over with oils. Many of the currently available recipes actually take longer to dry than oil paint does! Back in my Canada days, a student of mine figured out a version that actually worked and gave me a tube of it (long since used up). Tragically (he was a lovely man), he committed suicide without having ever written the recipe down. Today, I use just egg yolk and water into which titanium white is mixed (I use it only for the initial stage of the underpainting in the lighter-value areas of my oil paintings). This dries immediately and can be applied as an impasto, or dry brushed thinly. I have paintings painted 30 years ago with this egg-yolk impasto underpainting, painted on stretched canvas, and they are not cracked at all.
Tempera is very different from oil paint, because it dries immediately. In other words, it is a wet-on-dry medium, as opposed to a wet-into-wet medium. Tempera and oils are much misunderstood. Tempera is a very versatile medium—it can be painted with crosshatched fine brushstrokes, it can be dry brushed, it can be floated onto the surface as a wash or applied as an opaque semi-impasto. On the other hand, oil paint has to follow a definite algorithm, if it is to last. Another factor is that all traditional paints turn more and more transparent as they dry. Oil paint takes months to dry properly (chemically, it takes 400 years to dry, and then it starts to fall apart!), and therefore it has to have a very specific layering in order to minimise its darkening over time. Tempera dries immediately and can have a dozen coats applied quickly, counteracting its turning transparent. Tempera is completely permanent; there are extant, un-cracked and non-darkened examples dating from the classical periods, 2500 years ago. Another misapprehension about tempera is that it must be painted on a rigid, in-flexible surface (a panel of some kind). This is not true. I frequently and flippantly ask my classes if they’ve ever seen a fried egg that isn’t flexible. Annigoni painted his big temperas on canvas, as I did, too, from time-to-time.
I worked in tempera for 15 years before switching to oils, however, my medium was different from Annigoni’s and consisted of; 4 parts egg yolk, 1 part copal varnish (no stand oil) and 2 parts water with a generous splash of white vinegar to stop the growth of mould. My switch to oils came about because of my first major commissioned portrait—the client, Sears, Roebuck and Co., in America, didn’t understand what an egg-based painting is; they wanted an oil portrait. The transition was very difficult for me, but after about a year, I realised that one of the great strengths of oil paint is that it paints wet-into-wet. I much prefer working in oils now. Tempera doesn’t quite have the depth and richness of colour that oils have.
Egg tempera is an ancient emulsion medium, certainly going back to early Egyptian times. There are traces of it on Egyptian sarcophagi that date from circa 1000 BC. There are literally dozens of recipes for tempera; the simplest one for egg tempera is the one Andrew Wyeth used; 1 part egg yolk to 1 part water. Annigoni used a tempera grassa, as you know; 1 whole egg and 2 extra yolks (= 1 volume), mixed thoroughly with a half volume of a 50/50 mixture of stand oil and (copal) varnish. These should be mixed together for about 20 minutes, if mixed by hand. We used an old electric blender (the modern ones are too strong and would demulsify the egg, which would definitely be counter-productive!). After that, up to one-and-a-half volumes of water is added—less is better, since one can always add more water if needed. Annigoni didn’t do this last step; he mixed his pigments with white wine, adding the aqueous ingredient in this way (the wine he preferred for his paint was a dry Lacrima Cristi—the Tears of Christ). Stored in a fridge, tempera lasts for many months (in the old days, before fridges, the tempera was kept in a large basin of river sand, which is an excellent insulator and keeps things cold). In fact, Nick Caracciolo, a brilliant student of Nerina Simi’s back in the 1960s, used to keep his tempera stored in river sand. When I asked him why he didn’t use a fridge, he said, “Well, you see man, I don’t have a fridge.” I didn’t have one either—we were all extremely poor. Tragically, Nick died in a car accident 30 years ago.
The word ‘tempera’ is usually used today to mean egg tempera, but this meaning is not implicit in the word. Tempera applies to any paint; one tempers pigments with linseed oil to create oil paints. Michelangelo used a glue tempera to complete his paintings on the Sistine Chapel ceiling—most of this has now been removed by idiot restorers who were never trained to paint, beyond a few studio courses. The word derives from the Latin distemperare—to mix thoroughly. Most painters in the past, including the Venetians, used tempera as an underpainting medium. Caravaggio used a tempera known in Tuscany as putrido (it stinks as it goes bad in the studio). The real recipe has been lost, and none of the available recipes work. The point of using putrido is that it can be applied as an impasto, but dries within 15 minutes, and can be immediately painted over with oils. Many of the currently available recipes actually take longer to dry than oil paint does! Back in my Canada days, a student of mine figured out a version that actually worked and gave me a tube of it (long since used up). Tragically (he was a lovely man), he committed suicide without having ever written the recipe down. Today, I use just egg yolk and water into which titanium white is mixed (I use it only for the initial stage of the underpainting in the lighter-value areas of my oil paintings). This dries immediately and can be applied as an impasto, or dry brushed thinly. I have paintings painted 30 years ago with this egg-yolk impasto underpainting, painted on stretched canvas, and they are not cracked at all.
Tempera is very different from oil paint, because it dries immediately. In other words, it is a wet-on-dry medium, as opposed to a wet-into-wet medium. Tempera and oils are much misunderstood. Tempera is a very versatile medium—it can be painted with crosshatched fine brushstrokes, it can be dry brushed, it can be floated onto the surface as a wash or applied as an opaque semi-impasto. On the other hand, oil paint has to follow a definite algorithm, if it is to last. Another factor is that all traditional paints turn more and more transparent as they dry. Oil paint takes months to dry properly (chemically, it takes 400 years to dry, and then it starts to fall apart!), and therefore it has to have a very specific layering in order to minimise its darkening over time. Tempera dries immediately and can have a dozen coats applied quickly, counteracting its turning transparent. Tempera is completely permanent; there are extant, un-cracked and non-darkened examples dating from the classical periods, 2500 years ago. Another misapprehension about tempera is that it must be painted on a rigid, in-flexible surface (a panel of some kind). This is not true. I frequently and flippantly ask my classes if they’ve ever seen a fried egg that isn’t flexible. Annigoni painted his big temperas on canvas, as I did, too, from time-to-time.
I worked in tempera for 15 years before switching to oils, however, my medium was different from Annigoni’s and consisted of; 4 parts egg yolk, 1 part copal varnish (no stand oil) and 2 parts water with a generous splash of white vinegar to stop the growth of mould. My switch to oils came about because of my first major commissioned portrait—the client, Sears, Roebuck and Co., in America, didn’t understand what an egg-based painting is; they wanted an oil portrait. The transition was very difficult for me, but after about a year, I realised that one of the great strengths of oil paint is that it paints wet-into-wet. I much prefer working in oils now. Tempera doesn’t quite have the depth and richness of colour that oils have.
Pietro Annigoni’s tempera grassa recipe taken from Luciano Pelizzari, Pietro Annigoni: Il Periodo Inglese, 1949 – 1971, ed. Leonardo DeLuca (Rome: Leonardo DeLuca, 1991), 283. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Phoenix 1, 1975-1978. Egg tempera on panel, 40” x 40”. Private collection, Toronto, CA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
The Acrobat, 1977. Egg tempera, oil and acrylic (the frame) on panel, 16” x 12”. Private collection, Denmark. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Phoenix 2, 1975-1976. Egg tempera on panel, 40” x 28”. Private collection, Denmark. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Phoenix 1, 1975-1978. Egg tempera on panel, 40” x 40”. Private collection, Toronto, CA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
The Acrobat, 1977. Egg tempera, oil and acrylic (the frame) on panel, 16” x 12”. Private collection, Denmark. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Phoenix 2, 1975-1976. Egg tempera on panel, 40” x 28”. Private collection, Denmark. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Throughout his life, Annigoni would sign his paintings with a ‘C’ followed by three crucifixes. I believe the ‘C’ stood for ‘Canonicus’ (Latin for ‘Law’). The three crosses signify the ‘Via Crucis’ (Stations of the Cross). Annigoni believed that they resembled the “hard road to the cross that every artist must travel”. Did he ever discuss the reasoning behind why he signed his works with this signature?
I’m afraid this answer may be a little disappointing for you. Nobody really knows what it means. Once, when we had all gone to the seaside for lunch to celebrate Benedetto’s birthday (I think he was turning 30), I asked Annigoni what it meant. He reached across the table, dragged me towards him, looked almost nose-to-nose in my face, and growled, “Aha!” He then threw me back onto my chair. I like to tell the story as me being dragged across my spaghetti al mare, but I don’t think that’s actually true (there’s a saying in Italian: se non è vero, è ben trovato—even if it’s not true, it makes a good story!). The spaghetti part may not be true, but the rest of the story is.
What is certain is that he signed his early work Canonificus III (the Third Law). This eventually became the more famous CIII. In the film, Annigoni: Portrait of an Artist, the actor doing the voice-over has Annigoni say that the III represents the artist’s suffering on the way to Calvary, but I have no idea where the scriptwriter read that (it must be in Annigoni’s autobiography). My own guess is that it refers to the third law of Chinese painting as written by Xie He, around 550 AD: [the painter must pay attention to] the depiction of form, shape and line. This would fit Annigoni, not only for the obvious reason (he was a Realist), but also because he hugely admired Chinese brushwork. This 3rd law is sometimes written as the representation of things as they are. This translation appeals to me because of the implied question behind “things as they are.” What are things, really?
Throughout my life I got to know Annigoni’s son, Benedetto Annigoni, who was a marvellous person—an engineer, not an artist. He died in 2011 and is much missed. His death was very sudden. He was very pleased with what we are doing at our academy.
I’m afraid this answer may be a little disappointing for you. Nobody really knows what it means. Once, when we had all gone to the seaside for lunch to celebrate Benedetto’s birthday (I think he was turning 30), I asked Annigoni what it meant. He reached across the table, dragged me towards him, looked almost nose-to-nose in my face, and growled, “Aha!” He then threw me back onto my chair. I like to tell the story as me being dragged across my spaghetti al mare, but I don’t think that’s actually true (there’s a saying in Italian: se non è vero, è ben trovato—even if it’s not true, it makes a good story!). The spaghetti part may not be true, but the rest of the story is.
What is certain is that he signed his early work Canonificus III (the Third Law). This eventually became the more famous CIII. In the film, Annigoni: Portrait of an Artist, the actor doing the voice-over has Annigoni say that the III represents the artist’s suffering on the way to Calvary, but I have no idea where the scriptwriter read that (it must be in Annigoni’s autobiography). My own guess is that it refers to the third law of Chinese painting as written by Xie He, around 550 AD: [the painter must pay attention to] the depiction of form, shape and line. This would fit Annigoni, not only for the obvious reason (he was a Realist), but also because he hugely admired Chinese brushwork. This 3rd law is sometimes written as the representation of things as they are. This translation appeals to me because of the implied question behind “things as they are.” What are things, really?
Throughout my life I got to know Annigoni’s son, Benedetto Annigoni, who was a marvellous person—an engineer, not an artist. He died in 2011 and is much missed. His death was very sudden. He was very pleased with what we are doing at our academy.
Pietro Annigoni, Portrait of Mario Galli, 1933. Watercolour and black ink on paper, dimensions unknown. Collection unknown. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Michael John Angel (left) and Benedetto Annigoni (right, Pietro Annigoni’s son) at the Angel Academy of Art in Florence. c.2000-2001. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Pietro Annigoni, Portrait of Patricia Rawlings (La Strega), 1959. Oil tempera on board, 52” x 30”. Collection of Christian Malinverni, Lugo di Vicenza, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Michael John Angel (left) and Benedetto Annigoni (right, Pietro Annigoni’s son) at the Angel Academy of Art in Florence. c.2000-2001. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Pietro Annigoni, Portrait of Patricia Rawlings (La Strega), 1959. Oil tempera on board, 52” x 30”. Collection of Christian Malinverni, Lugo di Vicenza, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
In 1970 you left Italy to return to Canada. What were the circumstances that led you to return as it sounds like you were in an ideal position in Italy, being accepted into Annigoni’s circle and having had the privilege of training with him?
My training with Annigoni was very much an on-the-job one and as explained previously, he was away a lot in 1969-70, so there was no real conclusion to the training. During this time I had no money, and there were no odd jobs around besides helping Nando paint schlocky paintings for restaurants and restoring some paintings in private collections so, I returned to Canada to start my career. Leaving Annigoni was neither easy nor hard. I did see him again after 14 or 15 years. I was in Italy on holiday and went to see him, to show him some photos of my paintings. He approved, and we kissed as I left. He died a few years later (1988). For years, I could still feel his stubble on my cheeks.
When I got back to Canada I was raring to go, but I had no money, so I stayed with my mum for a few years. I visited Tim Phillips once and shared my experiences that I had with Annigoni. Tim had become a lay priest and was obsessed with Fundamentalist Christianity. Eventually, I took a job in a framing factory. One of the workers there suggested that I try painting landscapes and selling them at trade fairs, which I did. In the first fair, I made more money from the landscapes than I’d made in two months at the framer’s; so, I quit my job there. I had 6 or 8 really good friends from my high-school days (we continued to party together for a good 15 years more!), and all of them were interested in the painting process so, I gave free lessons every Saturday at a girlfriend’s apartment. This got me started teaching. Since I was lacking in formal traditional-art education, I read every how-to-draw and how-to-paint book I could lay my hands on (and there were lots!). Some of these were compilations of texts written by painters in the past, or by people who knew those painters—Mrs Merrifield, Eastlake, Cennino, Pacheco, de Meyerne, Thomas Bardwell, Moreau-Vauthier, Laurie, Vanderpoel, Doerner, Harold Speed, Maroger, Rex Vicat Cole and Meyer, to name only a few. Most of them were difficult to find—there was no internet, remember, and I didn’t know any of their names; I had to stumble across them, one by one. An advantage I had over the art historians who wrote about all this was that I could put into practice what I was reading and test its viability (a lot of it was speculative nonsense, as it turns out!). Even when I was a tempera painter, the books on oil painting were extremely helpful. As for how-to-draw, as I mentioned previously, I read everything I could lay my hands on. My mum let me have a room in her apartment as a studio, and I started to teach there three times a week, for three hours each time. I charged money for this, unlike my earlier lessons to friends. Word of mouth went around, and after a few years, I was able to rent a teaching studio and open the (rather pretentiously named) National Portrait Academy. I also taught, one half-day a week, at the Three Schools of Art in Toronto. It had been in business for several decades (perhaps 30 years?), but folded in around 1982, due to lack of governmental financial support.
York University in Toronto was one of the only two universities in North America that taught the history of portrait painting (I seem to remember that the other was in Seattle—neither one teaches it anymore, as far as I know). I had applied to York for advanced standing in Studio Art, based on my experience and had been accepted, but then came my biggest breakthrough. Sears, Roebuck and Co., was looking to have their retiring CEO painted—their usual portrait painter had died—and they contacted the two universities to ask if they knew any portrait painters. York University gave them my number. They phoned and asked how much I would charge; terrified, I said $10,000 (which was an unimaginably huge amount of money to me, then). They said, “That sounds about right.” A competition was set up between six of us: Jamie Wyeth, Henrietta Wyeth (Andrew’s sister), Ray Kinsler, John Howard Sanden, Frank Draper and me, and they chose me, God bless them! I painted Edward Telling, the CEO, eight times before we arrived at a version we could both live with. After that, it was plain sailing; everybody sits on everybody else’s board of directors, and word got around—I usually had two or three (or sometimes even four!) boardroom portraits on the go after that.
I have only ever made two works for the mass market. One was a limited-edition print (150 of them) of the Art Deco facade of the Toronto Stock Exchange building (Exchange Tower) for the stockbrokers’ association, and the other was a Christmas card for the Toronto Children’s Hospital. The Christmas card was a huge success and even made it into the Canadian national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. It sold 64,000 copies at $2 a card. On the back was written that Mr. Angel had kindly donated his commission (a.k.a. percentage of sales) to the hospital. I must be a very generous person. In addition to many other commissions in the USA, I have two portraits of the Chancellors in McGill University in Montreal, and a portrait of the CEO in Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. I had six paintings (two portraits and four landscapes) in the World Trade Centre in New York City. They were blown up, of course, in 9/11.
Realism held my interest completely. During the 1970s in Canada there wasn’t a realist art scene. Nobody knew who Annigoni was. Then, as now, the Art Establishment was all about abstract work—Franz Klein, Yves Klein, Jasper Johns, and Robert Motherwell. Stuff that doesn’t need thinking about—you just hang it on your wall and say whatever nonsense you want about it; it’s just decoration, like designer clothing. Don’t misunderstand me, there’s nothing wrong with abstract painting if you like it; it’s just too bad that it and representational painting are both called Art. They have almost nothing to do with each other, and to call them the same thing is confusing. Also at this time, I married my first wife, Stephene. We initially met at the National Portrait Academy where she was briefly a student. We were married for 11 years.
My training with Annigoni was very much an on-the-job one and as explained previously, he was away a lot in 1969-70, so there was no real conclusion to the training. During this time I had no money, and there were no odd jobs around besides helping Nando paint schlocky paintings for restaurants and restoring some paintings in private collections so, I returned to Canada to start my career. Leaving Annigoni was neither easy nor hard. I did see him again after 14 or 15 years. I was in Italy on holiday and went to see him, to show him some photos of my paintings. He approved, and we kissed as I left. He died a few years later (1988). For years, I could still feel his stubble on my cheeks.
When I got back to Canada I was raring to go, but I had no money, so I stayed with my mum for a few years. I visited Tim Phillips once and shared my experiences that I had with Annigoni. Tim had become a lay priest and was obsessed with Fundamentalist Christianity. Eventually, I took a job in a framing factory. One of the workers there suggested that I try painting landscapes and selling them at trade fairs, which I did. In the first fair, I made more money from the landscapes than I’d made in two months at the framer’s; so, I quit my job there. I had 6 or 8 really good friends from my high-school days (we continued to party together for a good 15 years more!), and all of them were interested in the painting process so, I gave free lessons every Saturday at a girlfriend’s apartment. This got me started teaching. Since I was lacking in formal traditional-art education, I read every how-to-draw and how-to-paint book I could lay my hands on (and there were lots!). Some of these were compilations of texts written by painters in the past, or by people who knew those painters—Mrs Merrifield, Eastlake, Cennino, Pacheco, de Meyerne, Thomas Bardwell, Moreau-Vauthier, Laurie, Vanderpoel, Doerner, Harold Speed, Maroger, Rex Vicat Cole and Meyer, to name only a few. Most of them were difficult to find—there was no internet, remember, and I didn’t know any of their names; I had to stumble across them, one by one. An advantage I had over the art historians who wrote about all this was that I could put into practice what I was reading and test its viability (a lot of it was speculative nonsense, as it turns out!). Even when I was a tempera painter, the books on oil painting were extremely helpful. As for how-to-draw, as I mentioned previously, I read everything I could lay my hands on. My mum let me have a room in her apartment as a studio, and I started to teach there three times a week, for three hours each time. I charged money for this, unlike my earlier lessons to friends. Word of mouth went around, and after a few years, I was able to rent a teaching studio and open the (rather pretentiously named) National Portrait Academy. I also taught, one half-day a week, at the Three Schools of Art in Toronto. It had been in business for several decades (perhaps 30 years?), but folded in around 1982, due to lack of governmental financial support.
York University in Toronto was one of the only two universities in North America that taught the history of portrait painting (I seem to remember that the other was in Seattle—neither one teaches it anymore, as far as I know). I had applied to York for advanced standing in Studio Art, based on my experience and had been accepted, but then came my biggest breakthrough. Sears, Roebuck and Co., was looking to have their retiring CEO painted—their usual portrait painter had died—and they contacted the two universities to ask if they knew any portrait painters. York University gave them my number. They phoned and asked how much I would charge; terrified, I said $10,000 (which was an unimaginably huge amount of money to me, then). They said, “That sounds about right.” A competition was set up between six of us: Jamie Wyeth, Henrietta Wyeth (Andrew’s sister), Ray Kinsler, John Howard Sanden, Frank Draper and me, and they chose me, God bless them! I painted Edward Telling, the CEO, eight times before we arrived at a version we could both live with. After that, it was plain sailing; everybody sits on everybody else’s board of directors, and word got around—I usually had two or three (or sometimes even four!) boardroom portraits on the go after that.
I have only ever made two works for the mass market. One was a limited-edition print (150 of them) of the Art Deco facade of the Toronto Stock Exchange building (Exchange Tower) for the stockbrokers’ association, and the other was a Christmas card for the Toronto Children’s Hospital. The Christmas card was a huge success and even made it into the Canadian national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. It sold 64,000 copies at $2 a card. On the back was written that Mr. Angel had kindly donated his commission (a.k.a. percentage of sales) to the hospital. I must be a very generous person. In addition to many other commissions in the USA, I have two portraits of the Chancellors in McGill University in Montreal, and a portrait of the CEO in Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. I had six paintings (two portraits and four landscapes) in the World Trade Centre in New York City. They were blown up, of course, in 9/11.
Realism held my interest completely. During the 1970s in Canada there wasn’t a realist art scene. Nobody knew who Annigoni was. Then, as now, the Art Establishment was all about abstract work—Franz Klein, Yves Klein, Jasper Johns, and Robert Motherwell. Stuff that doesn’t need thinking about—you just hang it on your wall and say whatever nonsense you want about it; it’s just decoration, like designer clothing. Don’t misunderstand me, there’s nothing wrong with abstract painting if you like it; it’s just too bad that it and representational painting are both called Art. They have almost nothing to do with each other, and to call them the same thing is confusing. Also at this time, I married my first wife, Stephene. We initially met at the National Portrait Academy where she was briefly a student. We were married for 11 years.
Michael John Angel at a lunch with Pietro Annigoni and friends, inside a hotel in Ponte Buggianese, ITA. 1968. L-R: Giovanna Bernardini (wife of Fernando Bernardini who took the photo), Silvestro Pistolese, Pietro Annigoni, Riccardo Nofferi (the next 4 people are art dealers, art critics and friends who came from all over the world to have lunch with Annigoni), Michael John Angel (far right). Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Mother and Child, c.1970. Egg tempera and gold paint on panel, 14” x 10”. Collection unknown (painted for the Toronto Children’s Hospital, Toronto, CA). Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Mother and Child, c.1970. Egg tempera and gold paint on panel, 14” x 10”. Collection unknown (painted for the Toronto Children’s Hospital, Toronto, CA). Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
In 1985, you returned to Italy for a holiday and went to visit Annigoni to show him some photos of your paintings, as you have mentioned. It sounds like it was a beautiful moment, that is, him seeing you having come into your own as a painter which led to the memorable kiss. Can you share more about your second trip to Italy and the last time you saw Annigoni before he died?
It was a lovely moment, I cared for Annigoni very much, but I was pretty well established by that time as a portrait painter. As I alluded to earlier on in the interview, it’s important to remember that I was an ex-pupil, not a friend. After the kiss, he told Annibale (the old guy who looked after the studio, keeping it clean and tidy) to show me the Cinciarda, Annigoni’s full-length painting of a street-person, a beggar. Annibale wheeled it out for me in the main studio. I was gobsmacked by the painting (in a very positive way, of course)—I knew it from reproductions, but seeing it “live” was overwhelming. I think, Annigoni saw these street people as being living allegories of us all, lost and cut off from our rich history. The painting is now in the Museo Annigoni in the Villa Bardini, Florence.
On this same trip, Stephene and I had dinner with Daniel Graves and Charles Cecil (at a Chinese restaurant!)— this was back in the time when they were partners in Studio Cecil-Graves. I had a flourishing school for amateur painters in Toronto back then--Michael John Angel Studios—with about 60 or 70 part-time students. After Florence, Stephene and I went down to Rome, which is my favourite city in all the world! We then went to Venice—the Venetian Renaissance is my second-most favourite period in art history (the first is 19th-century European and British academic). Stephene and I would go to Europe from time to time to get away from the stress of professional painting. Artistically, it is very hard to keep a consistently high quality on demand. Once, for example, after finishing two big paintings and 20 or so related smaller studies for Sears House in Washington, D.C., Stephene had to pour me onto a plane and take me to Spain to recuperate for a month!
As a side note, the subject of these Washington paintings was Pennsylvania Avenue in the 19th century (Sears House was on Pennsylvania Avenue). Stephene and I were most of the models. I was in my 30s then and still had a lot to figure out about pictorial composition. Still, I think they’re pretty good paintings. The only photo I have of one of them, The Old Market, was taken when it was still unfinished; several figures in the photo didn’t yet have their heads, for example.
It was a lovely moment, I cared for Annigoni very much, but I was pretty well established by that time as a portrait painter. As I alluded to earlier on in the interview, it’s important to remember that I was an ex-pupil, not a friend. After the kiss, he told Annibale (the old guy who looked after the studio, keeping it clean and tidy) to show me the Cinciarda, Annigoni’s full-length painting of a street-person, a beggar. Annibale wheeled it out for me in the main studio. I was gobsmacked by the painting (in a very positive way, of course)—I knew it from reproductions, but seeing it “live” was overwhelming. I think, Annigoni saw these street people as being living allegories of us all, lost and cut off from our rich history. The painting is now in the Museo Annigoni in the Villa Bardini, Florence.
On this same trip, Stephene and I had dinner with Daniel Graves and Charles Cecil (at a Chinese restaurant!)— this was back in the time when they were partners in Studio Cecil-Graves. I had a flourishing school for amateur painters in Toronto back then--Michael John Angel Studios—with about 60 or 70 part-time students. After Florence, Stephene and I went down to Rome, which is my favourite city in all the world! We then went to Venice—the Venetian Renaissance is my second-most favourite period in art history (the first is 19th-century European and British academic). Stephene and I would go to Europe from time to time to get away from the stress of professional painting. Artistically, it is very hard to keep a consistently high quality on demand. Once, for example, after finishing two big paintings and 20 or so related smaller studies for Sears House in Washington, D.C., Stephene had to pour me onto a plane and take me to Spain to recuperate for a month!
As a side note, the subject of these Washington paintings was Pennsylvania Avenue in the 19th century (Sears House was on Pennsylvania Avenue). Stephene and I were most of the models. I was in my 30s then and still had a lot to figure out about pictorial composition. Still, I think they’re pretty good paintings. The only photo I have of one of them, The Old Market, was taken when it was still unfinished; several figures in the photo didn’t yet have their heads, for example.
Pietro Annigoni, Cinciarda, 1945. Oil tempera on canvas, 71” x 40”. Collection of Archivio Storico, Fondazione CR Firenze, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Archivio Storico, Fondazione CR Firenze, Florence, ITA.
Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1880s, c.1972. Oil on canvas, 54” x 79”. Collection unknown (painted for Sears House on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., Sears has since sold the building and most of its art collection). Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
The Old Market, Washington D.C. in the 1880s (work in progress), c.1972. Oil on canvas, 54” x 79”. Collection unknown (painted for Sears House on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., Sears has since sold the building and most of its art collection). Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1880s, c.1972. Oil on canvas, 54” x 79”. Collection unknown (painted for Sears House on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., Sears has since sold the building and most of its art collection). Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
The Old Market, Washington D.C. in the 1880s (work in progress), c.1972. Oil on canvas, 54” x 79”. Collection unknown (painted for Sears House on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., Sears has since sold the building and most of its art collection). Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
You mentioned your marriage to your ex-wife Stephene. Would you like to explain more about your courtship, the development of your romance and what ultimately led to your separation?
Stephene really wanted to live in Italy (she thought) and so we moved here at the beginning of 1989; I too had always wanted to return here permanently. Giving up everything and starting again was pretty frightening. We had about $30,000 saved, and I had two portrait commissions on the easel that would give us another $25,000 after agents’ fees had been deducted, and we made that last for two years. Stephene comes from a wealthy family and she hadn’t realised how hard one has to work to establish oneself in a new country. We parted in 1995 and she went back to Canada.
A woman’s love can indeed ground a man and help keep him on the straight and narrow. Her beauty can be a source of inspiration for a painter’s creations, like a muse, helping him to create his life’s masterpiece; a home, children and shelter from the rain. The contemporary painter John Currin who paints in a highly mannerised Victorian-esque style has explained that before meeting his wife, Rachel, his work reflected angst and melancholy, however, after meeting his wife and marrying, he was no longer able to create works based on these moods. Do you feel as though your work changed after meeting your ex-wife, Stephene, and subsequently getting married?
No, I’m afraid there’s no parallel. Stephene had no affect on my painting. I didn’t know John Currin’s work before you mentioned him; I had to Google him. He should come and do three years at the Angel Academy of Art. Writing that reminds me of a true story; George Gershwin, at the height of his success, went to see Maurice Ravel and asked if he could study under him. Ravel asked Gershwin how much money he had made in the previous year. After Gershwin had told him, Ravel said, “I’ll tell you what: I’ll study under you!”
In 1989, you started an informal school once you had settled down permanently in Italy. Can you explain the process of establishing the school in Italy including how you found a location, how you advertised the school and how you brought it all together?
I arrived in Italy at the beginning of 1989 and began a sort of school here in the summer. It was very informal, though; several of my students from Canada came to study for a couple of months. I lived in a little village at that time called Castagno d’Andrea (where Andrea del Castagno came from) and was able to arrange rooms for them in nearby San Godenzo (a bigger village, 7 kilometres away). This school was very short-lived and only lasted a few months. Meanwhile, Daniel Graves and Charles Cecil had been partners for 10 or 12 years running Studio Cecil-Graves, but split up in 1993 (or thereabouts). Daniel started the Florence Academy of Art and asked if I would join him as co-director. We taught on alternate days. We are both Realist painters, but we each had a different take on Realism; however, we thought this would be good for the students to learn about. It wasn’t, it just confused them.
At this time, Stephene and I lived in the country, a 40-minute bus ride north of Florence. We had previously lived even further away for the first 10 months, in Castagno, as I mentioned previously. There, I started work on a mural for the church; a Sermon on the Mount, but after a while I realised that the Church expected me to paint it for free, so I had to stop. It’s a shame, really, the idea was a good one. The crowd listening to Jesus were to have been portraits of the villagers who lived in Castagno. The stony ground would be scraped aside here and there, showing planks underneath—they are all on a stage! It is all a marvellous work of fiction, a myth! (The planks would not be obvious; it would take a while to notice them.) I love Joseph Campbell’s statement; “these [myths] are things that never were, but are always.” Above the main painted area of the wall were to be the Four Apostles (the men who created the story) in separate trompe l’oeil niches, each with their living symbol; a bull, lion, eagle and angel, also trompe l’oeil (seemingly the real, live animals). It never got beyond the cartoons and the pre-study portraits of the villagers. I may still paint it, if I live long enough—the idea appeals to me. The cartoons are still rolled up in my house somewhere. Interestingly, a Canadian film company made a 25-minute film on this planned painting in 1990.
Coming back to Daniel and me, around 1995 we had an amicable split. I had a commission to paint a ceiling for a big house outside Chicago; so, I rented a 19th-century studio in Piazzale Donatello, and Michael John Angel Studios was founded to paint this work. A few students, including Jered Woznicki (who is now an instructor at the Angel Academy of Art, Florence), came with me as students, but also as assistants. We created the ceiling painting on canvas, which was rolled up and shipped to the client when it was finished—it took about three years to do it, on and off.
At this time, an ex-student of mine in Canada, Tim Slater, phoned and asked if I would be interested in starting a new school in Toronto, and I said that I would. Tim set it up—he was a genius at starting businesses on a shoestring—and I would fly to Canada every two months, spend two months there, then fly back to Florence for two months. The school there continued the name of Michael John Angel Studios. Tim took care of the business end of things, and we did well. When I was away in Italy, a couple of the other teachers (also ex-students) looked after the classes. We were geared to the amateur student (in the French sense of amateur; lovers of), and the classes were given in the evenings and on weekends. There was a total of about 120 students at our peak, but they didn’t all come to class at the same time; some came for just one (three-hour) class a week, others for two classes and others for three. One or two students were full-time.
Stephene really wanted to live in Italy (she thought) and so we moved here at the beginning of 1989; I too had always wanted to return here permanently. Giving up everything and starting again was pretty frightening. We had about $30,000 saved, and I had two portrait commissions on the easel that would give us another $25,000 after agents’ fees had been deducted, and we made that last for two years. Stephene comes from a wealthy family and she hadn’t realised how hard one has to work to establish oneself in a new country. We parted in 1995 and she went back to Canada.
A woman’s love can indeed ground a man and help keep him on the straight and narrow. Her beauty can be a source of inspiration for a painter’s creations, like a muse, helping him to create his life’s masterpiece; a home, children and shelter from the rain. The contemporary painter John Currin who paints in a highly mannerised Victorian-esque style has explained that before meeting his wife, Rachel, his work reflected angst and melancholy, however, after meeting his wife and marrying, he was no longer able to create works based on these moods. Do you feel as though your work changed after meeting your ex-wife, Stephene, and subsequently getting married?
No, I’m afraid there’s no parallel. Stephene had no affect on my painting. I didn’t know John Currin’s work before you mentioned him; I had to Google him. He should come and do three years at the Angel Academy of Art. Writing that reminds me of a true story; George Gershwin, at the height of his success, went to see Maurice Ravel and asked if he could study under him. Ravel asked Gershwin how much money he had made in the previous year. After Gershwin had told him, Ravel said, “I’ll tell you what: I’ll study under you!”
In 1989, you started an informal school once you had settled down permanently in Italy. Can you explain the process of establishing the school in Italy including how you found a location, how you advertised the school and how you brought it all together?
I arrived in Italy at the beginning of 1989 and began a sort of school here in the summer. It was very informal, though; several of my students from Canada came to study for a couple of months. I lived in a little village at that time called Castagno d’Andrea (where Andrea del Castagno came from) and was able to arrange rooms for them in nearby San Godenzo (a bigger village, 7 kilometres away). This school was very short-lived and only lasted a few months. Meanwhile, Daniel Graves and Charles Cecil had been partners for 10 or 12 years running Studio Cecil-Graves, but split up in 1993 (or thereabouts). Daniel started the Florence Academy of Art and asked if I would join him as co-director. We taught on alternate days. We are both Realist painters, but we each had a different take on Realism; however, we thought this would be good for the students to learn about. It wasn’t, it just confused them.
At this time, Stephene and I lived in the country, a 40-minute bus ride north of Florence. We had previously lived even further away for the first 10 months, in Castagno, as I mentioned previously. There, I started work on a mural for the church; a Sermon on the Mount, but after a while I realised that the Church expected me to paint it for free, so I had to stop. It’s a shame, really, the idea was a good one. The crowd listening to Jesus were to have been portraits of the villagers who lived in Castagno. The stony ground would be scraped aside here and there, showing planks underneath—they are all on a stage! It is all a marvellous work of fiction, a myth! (The planks would not be obvious; it would take a while to notice them.) I love Joseph Campbell’s statement; “these [myths] are things that never were, but are always.” Above the main painted area of the wall were to be the Four Apostles (the men who created the story) in separate trompe l’oeil niches, each with their living symbol; a bull, lion, eagle and angel, also trompe l’oeil (seemingly the real, live animals). It never got beyond the cartoons and the pre-study portraits of the villagers. I may still paint it, if I live long enough—the idea appeals to me. The cartoons are still rolled up in my house somewhere. Interestingly, a Canadian film company made a 25-minute film on this planned painting in 1990.
Coming back to Daniel and me, around 1995 we had an amicable split. I had a commission to paint a ceiling for a big house outside Chicago; so, I rented a 19th-century studio in Piazzale Donatello, and Michael John Angel Studios was founded to paint this work. A few students, including Jered Woznicki (who is now an instructor at the Angel Academy of Art, Florence), came with me as students, but also as assistants. We created the ceiling painting on canvas, which was rolled up and shipped to the client when it was finished—it took about three years to do it, on and off.
At this time, an ex-student of mine in Canada, Tim Slater, phoned and asked if I would be interested in starting a new school in Toronto, and I said that I would. Tim set it up—he was a genius at starting businesses on a shoestring—and I would fly to Canada every two months, spend two months there, then fly back to Florence for two months. The school there continued the name of Michael John Angel Studios. Tim took care of the business end of things, and we did well. When I was away in Italy, a couple of the other teachers (also ex-students) looked after the classes. We were geared to the amateur student (in the French sense of amateur; lovers of), and the classes were given in the evenings and on weekends. There was a total of about 120 students at our peak, but they didn’t all come to class at the same time; some came for just one (three-hour) class a week, others for two classes and others for three. One or two students were full-time.
Michael John Angel working on the cartoon of Sermon on the Mount (abandoned mural project) in the Corsini Villa, Castagno, ITA. c.1990. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Lamberto Ringressi, c.1990. Mixed media on canvas, 12” x 14”. Collection of the Ringressi family, Castagno d’Andrea, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Study for St John the Evangelist (Stephen Bond), c.1990. Oil on canvas, 24” x 20”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Lamberto Ringressi, c.1990. Mixed media on canvas, 12” x 14”. Collection of the Ringressi family, Castagno d’Andrea, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Study for St John the Evangelist (Stephen Bond), c.1990. Oil on canvas, 24” x 20”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Concerning the course of training offered at Michael John Angel Studios, what did you base the curriculum on? Was it essentially a distillation of all you had read about the great masters’ training of the past and what you had gained in your own self-education?
As I said, Michael John Angel Studios was geared towards the amateur painter. There is very little work for professional painters in Canada (Canadian culture favours the opera, the ballet and the symphony orchestra as far as the arts go)—people who wanted to learn traditional, classic painting techniques had nowhere local to go. Still, beginners started with Bargue drawings and progressed to casts and still life, but slowly, with an individual progression. Remember that this was a hobby for them; they were happy to come one day a week for the rest of their lives. Drawing and painting from the live model was also incorporated, but I can’t remember how it fit into the schedule (perhaps for the first half of each three-hour class). During each of the two-month periods in which I was in Canada (three times a year), I would teach five classes a week, as well as lecturing on art history and historical painting methods every so often. Other teachers in Toronto were Juan Martinez and Fernando Freitas, both ex-students of mine. In spite of our school being a school for amateurs, there were several students who became professional artists, some full-time, others part-time: these include; Sara Sniderhan, Sean Downey, Juan Martinez, Cindy MacMillan, Pauline Bradshaw, Linda Crawley, Kathy McNenly, Scott Owles and Gordon MacDonald. No workshops were offered at Michael John Angel Studios but I was giving workshops and lectures here and there in Chicago, Rome, Toronto and Florence. Jered and I met in one of my Chicago workshops—he is a graduate from the American Academy of Art and eventually he joined me in Florence, where he studied under me.
In Italy, I had been interviewing various people over a couple of years, trying to find somebody who would like to run the Italian side of things, so that we could start to build a real academy here (I’m a really lousy business person—I know what professional artists have to do to stay in business, but I’m rubbish at doing it). The Chicago ceiling painting (Capriccio) had been finished and shipped, but I was still using the studio for painting.
Jered had finished his student work and was raring to go as a teacher. Finally, a wonderful Australian lady I was going out with at this time (Sally Aurich, a brilliant Australian artist) introduced me to a good friend of hers, Lynne Barton, and together Lynne and I started to run a school, still called Michael John Angel Studios, in the Piazzale Donatello studio. Over time, we built this into the Angel Academy of Art, Florence. The program at the Angel Academy is now a full-time, three-year one, but we run workshops during the Spring and Summer, and give a one-month portrait-painting course three times a year.
As I said, Michael John Angel Studios was geared towards the amateur painter. There is very little work for professional painters in Canada (Canadian culture favours the opera, the ballet and the symphony orchestra as far as the arts go)—people who wanted to learn traditional, classic painting techniques had nowhere local to go. Still, beginners started with Bargue drawings and progressed to casts and still life, but slowly, with an individual progression. Remember that this was a hobby for them; they were happy to come one day a week for the rest of their lives. Drawing and painting from the live model was also incorporated, but I can’t remember how it fit into the schedule (perhaps for the first half of each three-hour class). During each of the two-month periods in which I was in Canada (three times a year), I would teach five classes a week, as well as lecturing on art history and historical painting methods every so often. Other teachers in Toronto were Juan Martinez and Fernando Freitas, both ex-students of mine. In spite of our school being a school for amateurs, there were several students who became professional artists, some full-time, others part-time: these include; Sara Sniderhan, Sean Downey, Juan Martinez, Cindy MacMillan, Pauline Bradshaw, Linda Crawley, Kathy McNenly, Scott Owles and Gordon MacDonald. No workshops were offered at Michael John Angel Studios but I was giving workshops and lectures here and there in Chicago, Rome, Toronto and Florence. Jered and I met in one of my Chicago workshops—he is a graduate from the American Academy of Art and eventually he joined me in Florence, where he studied under me.
In Italy, I had been interviewing various people over a couple of years, trying to find somebody who would like to run the Italian side of things, so that we could start to build a real academy here (I’m a really lousy business person—I know what professional artists have to do to stay in business, but I’m rubbish at doing it). The Chicago ceiling painting (Capriccio) had been finished and shipped, but I was still using the studio for painting.
Jered had finished his student work and was raring to go as a teacher. Finally, a wonderful Australian lady I was going out with at this time (Sally Aurich, a brilliant Australian artist) introduced me to a good friend of hers, Lynne Barton, and together Lynne and I started to run a school, still called Michael John Angel Studios, in the Piazzale Donatello studio. Over time, we built this into the Angel Academy of Art, Florence. The program at the Angel Academy is now a full-time, three-year one, but we run workshops during the Spring and Summer, and give a one-month portrait-painting course three times a year.
Michael John Angel standing beside his painting, Capriccio, a ceiling project inside of a 19th century studio in Piazzale Donatello, for a mansion outside of Chicago. 1998. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Michael John Angel’s studio assistants, Jered Woznicki (bottom) and Mike Grigg (top) working on Capriccio. c.1995-1996. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Michael John Angel and Australian realist painter, Lee Machelak standing before the underpainting of Capriccio. c.1995-1996. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Michael John Angel’s studio assistants, Jered Woznicki (bottom) and Mike Grigg (top) working on Capriccio. c.1995-1996. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Michael John Angel and Australian realist painter, Lee Machelak standing before the underpainting of Capriccio. c.1995-1996. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
In 1995 you founded Michael John Angel Studios in the Piazzale Donatello studio, as you have mentioned. Can you explain more about these years of your life and what it was like running this studio?
It was a while ago and I can’t really remember my exact routine. There were only five or six students at first, in order to cover the rent at the Piazzale Donatello studio. Juan Martinez and Fernando Freitas each came as students for a couple of months, but not at the same time. I was working on the Chicago ceiling piece, Capriccio, while the students would help (Juan painted some of the birds, and Jered painted a couple of the cherubs, as well as parts of the flower panels), or they would work from casts and still lifes, using Sight-Size. I would teach once or twice throughout the day. Interestingly, the Piazzale Donatello studio was Nicolò Barabino’s studio in the 19th century. It was here that Barabino painted the full-size oil paintings that served as the modelli for the mosaics on the front of the duomo (the paintings themselves are in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, and their paint quality and colour is breathtaking).
The school’s title, Michael John Angel Studios, lasted for about a year before it was changed to the Angel Academy of Art, Florence. During this time Jered started teaching, and we tried several people as administrators for Student Affairs, but none of the administrators made a good fit. In 1997, I was introduced to Lynne Barton by a wonderful Australian artist named Sally Aurich, whom I mentioned earlier, and Lynne and I decided that we had enough students to get a school started, with Jered as a teacher. Lynne contacted an Italian company and convinced them that we were a going concern (remember that Realism wasn’t recognised by the art establishment back then—few people knew it even existed anymore). That company then opened the Angel Academy of Art, Florence, in 1998 with Lynne running the business, Jered as an instructor and me running the studios, developing a programme and also teaching. Jered was brilliant at teaching and at setting up the workstations and live-model rooms; I’m terrible at that kind of thing. His suggestions for the programme were extremely helpful—we would discuss things way into the early mornings and through uncountable bottles of gin.
I understand Juan Martinez and Fernando Freitas were teachers at Michael John Angel Studios in Toronto. Fernando is today the director of the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto and Juan is a visiting instructor there. Can you explain how you first met the gentlemen and how they came to be teachers at Michael John Angel Studios?
Juan and Fernando were both beginners when they came to study at Michael John Angel Studios in Toronto; however, each is talented and after a few years as students, they started to teach the beginners, under my head.
What year did the Michael John Angel Studios in Toronto cease and what were the reasons for its closure?
Not to mince words, the school was stolen from me by Fernando Freitas and his girlfriend, Colleen Johnson, while I was out of the country in 2005. Since I was not in Toronto for 6 months a year, I’d left my “friends” Fernando and Colleen to look after things; for this, they needed access to the bank account. They took all the money and deposited it in an account of their own, then wrote to me explaining that I was no longer needed. They gambled—correctly—that I would not spend the $15,000 that my lawyer told me it would cost to take them to court. They kept all my easels and casts and lied to the students, telling them that I had decided not to teach in Toronto anymore. Juan continued to teach there. I bear him no ill will; he needed the money, and not everybody has the strength to stand up for what’s right. A number of students quit after they heard that I was not coming back to teach there. Tim Slater, the man who established the business end of Michael John Angel Studios in Toronto ended up drinking himself to death, a couple of years after losing the school.
These days, I never go to Toronto. My only family is my wonderful wife Megan, a very talented animal painter, and she lives here with me. I've been very lucky and had some beautiful women in my life! I have no children. I enjoy painting children—they’re real characters—but I have no desire to spend any time with them. Their opinions on Raphael, for instance, don’t interest me at all.
I understand you met Jered Woznicki during a workshop that you were teaching in Chicago, while he was a student at the American Academy of Art, also in Chicago, as you have previously mentioned. Jered is now a senior instructor at the Angel Academy of Art. Can you elaborate on your friendship with Jered over the years?
Jered was 17 or 18 when I first met him during my workshop in Chicago. After taking that workshop, he enrolled at the Florence Academy of Art (I was co-director with Daniel at that time). Jered and I barely knew each other back then. He was a very talented student, and I was very happy that he, along with other students, could help with the ceiling project which I painted for the mansion in Chicago. For a brief while I had a dream that Michael John Angel Studios would become a working studio that first trained the students, then gave them work. In the old days, paintings were painted by a studio of painters; there were drapery painters, landscape painters, perspective experts—the master usually painted only the heads and sometimes the hands. A successful artist (such as Sir Joshua Reynolds or Sir Anthony van Dyck) would have these experts in-house, while a less successful painter would send the painting down the street to her/his neighbourhood drapery painter, or landscape professional. This is one of the reasons the paintings are generally so good; each part was painted by an expert. It is interesting to compare Rubens’s colour studies (the so-called modelli). When Rubens had a head-of-studio he could trust to keep everybody on track (such as van Dyck or Jacob Jordaens), the modelli were very rough and sketchy; when there was nobody special, Rubens’s modelli are much more finished. The modello acts as a “script” so that the studio members know how the part that they are doing will fit into the whole. (I am constantly gobsmacked that art historians don’t seem to know this, in spite of their writing reams of text on them!). However, the dream wasn’t viable, there just isn’t the market for such large works anymore (they are very expensive).
My training with Annigoni was very different to the training that Jered received from me. My training was on-the-job, whereas Jered was a student in a defined programme. As mentioned previously, I was not one of Annigoni’s friends, I just worked in his studio whenever he was in Florence (which wasn’t often) and watched him work when I could. We would all, including the maestro, hang out together, though, when we were working on something out of town. I have fond memories of my time with Annigoni and as I explained earlier, I cared for him very much. In 2010, my painting Portrait of Annigoni was painted specifically for the city-wide celebration of the maestro’s birth. The festival went on all year, all over Florence—this portrait was reproduced everywhere (t-shirts, etc.).
Back to Jered and me, over the years we have become good friends. We would go for a ton of drinks after work, often with Martinho Correia (another ex-student and an excellent and successful painter). We are still friends, but I rarely see Jered these days, we only see each other at work (our schedules overlap one afternoon a week, every Tuesday morning when I go in there to teach grisaille underpainting). I tend to become close to some of the students (we are lucky that we attract the loveliest people, who are also very talented), but Jered doesn’t like to socialise with them. This rather limits our intercourse. I don’t drink anymore; so, I don’t go out for dinner or drinks with the students these days, either.
It was a while ago and I can’t really remember my exact routine. There were only five or six students at first, in order to cover the rent at the Piazzale Donatello studio. Juan Martinez and Fernando Freitas each came as students for a couple of months, but not at the same time. I was working on the Chicago ceiling piece, Capriccio, while the students would help (Juan painted some of the birds, and Jered painted a couple of the cherubs, as well as parts of the flower panels), or they would work from casts and still lifes, using Sight-Size. I would teach once or twice throughout the day. Interestingly, the Piazzale Donatello studio was Nicolò Barabino’s studio in the 19th century. It was here that Barabino painted the full-size oil paintings that served as the modelli for the mosaics on the front of the duomo (the paintings themselves are in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, and their paint quality and colour is breathtaking).
The school’s title, Michael John Angel Studios, lasted for about a year before it was changed to the Angel Academy of Art, Florence. During this time Jered started teaching, and we tried several people as administrators for Student Affairs, but none of the administrators made a good fit. In 1997, I was introduced to Lynne Barton by a wonderful Australian artist named Sally Aurich, whom I mentioned earlier, and Lynne and I decided that we had enough students to get a school started, with Jered as a teacher. Lynne contacted an Italian company and convinced them that we were a going concern (remember that Realism wasn’t recognised by the art establishment back then—few people knew it even existed anymore). That company then opened the Angel Academy of Art, Florence, in 1998 with Lynne running the business, Jered as an instructor and me running the studios, developing a programme and also teaching. Jered was brilliant at teaching and at setting up the workstations and live-model rooms; I’m terrible at that kind of thing. His suggestions for the programme were extremely helpful—we would discuss things way into the early mornings and through uncountable bottles of gin.
I understand Juan Martinez and Fernando Freitas were teachers at Michael John Angel Studios in Toronto. Fernando is today the director of the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto and Juan is a visiting instructor there. Can you explain how you first met the gentlemen and how they came to be teachers at Michael John Angel Studios?
Juan and Fernando were both beginners when they came to study at Michael John Angel Studios in Toronto; however, each is talented and after a few years as students, they started to teach the beginners, under my head.
What year did the Michael John Angel Studios in Toronto cease and what were the reasons for its closure?
Not to mince words, the school was stolen from me by Fernando Freitas and his girlfriend, Colleen Johnson, while I was out of the country in 2005. Since I was not in Toronto for 6 months a year, I’d left my “friends” Fernando and Colleen to look after things; for this, they needed access to the bank account. They took all the money and deposited it in an account of their own, then wrote to me explaining that I was no longer needed. They gambled—correctly—that I would not spend the $15,000 that my lawyer told me it would cost to take them to court. They kept all my easels and casts and lied to the students, telling them that I had decided not to teach in Toronto anymore. Juan continued to teach there. I bear him no ill will; he needed the money, and not everybody has the strength to stand up for what’s right. A number of students quit after they heard that I was not coming back to teach there. Tim Slater, the man who established the business end of Michael John Angel Studios in Toronto ended up drinking himself to death, a couple of years after losing the school.
These days, I never go to Toronto. My only family is my wonderful wife Megan, a very talented animal painter, and she lives here with me. I've been very lucky and had some beautiful women in my life! I have no children. I enjoy painting children—they’re real characters—but I have no desire to spend any time with them. Their opinions on Raphael, for instance, don’t interest me at all.
I understand you met Jered Woznicki during a workshop that you were teaching in Chicago, while he was a student at the American Academy of Art, also in Chicago, as you have previously mentioned. Jered is now a senior instructor at the Angel Academy of Art. Can you elaborate on your friendship with Jered over the years?
Jered was 17 or 18 when I first met him during my workshop in Chicago. After taking that workshop, he enrolled at the Florence Academy of Art (I was co-director with Daniel at that time). Jered and I barely knew each other back then. He was a very talented student, and I was very happy that he, along with other students, could help with the ceiling project which I painted for the mansion in Chicago. For a brief while I had a dream that Michael John Angel Studios would become a working studio that first trained the students, then gave them work. In the old days, paintings were painted by a studio of painters; there were drapery painters, landscape painters, perspective experts—the master usually painted only the heads and sometimes the hands. A successful artist (such as Sir Joshua Reynolds or Sir Anthony van Dyck) would have these experts in-house, while a less successful painter would send the painting down the street to her/his neighbourhood drapery painter, or landscape professional. This is one of the reasons the paintings are generally so good; each part was painted by an expert. It is interesting to compare Rubens’s colour studies (the so-called modelli). When Rubens had a head-of-studio he could trust to keep everybody on track (such as van Dyck or Jacob Jordaens), the modelli were very rough and sketchy; when there was nobody special, Rubens’s modelli are much more finished. The modello acts as a “script” so that the studio members know how the part that they are doing will fit into the whole. (I am constantly gobsmacked that art historians don’t seem to know this, in spite of their writing reams of text on them!). However, the dream wasn’t viable, there just isn’t the market for such large works anymore (they are very expensive).
My training with Annigoni was very different to the training that Jered received from me. My training was on-the-job, whereas Jered was a student in a defined programme. As mentioned previously, I was not one of Annigoni’s friends, I just worked in his studio whenever he was in Florence (which wasn’t often) and watched him work when I could. We would all, including the maestro, hang out together, though, when we were working on something out of town. I have fond memories of my time with Annigoni and as I explained earlier, I cared for him very much. In 2010, my painting Portrait of Annigoni was painted specifically for the city-wide celebration of the maestro’s birth. The festival went on all year, all over Florence—this portrait was reproduced everywhere (t-shirts, etc.).
Back to Jered and me, over the years we have become good friends. We would go for a ton of drinks after work, often with Martinho Correia (another ex-student and an excellent and successful painter). We are still friends, but I rarely see Jered these days, we only see each other at work (our schedules overlap one afternoon a week, every Tuesday morning when I go in there to teach grisaille underpainting). I tend to become close to some of the students (we are lucky that we attract the loveliest people, who are also very talented), but Jered doesn’t like to socialise with them. This rather limits our intercourse. I don’t drink anymore; so, I don’t go out for dinner or drinks with the students these days, either.
Portrait of Annigoni, 2010. Oil on canvas, 16” x 12”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
It is fascinating to learn that in 1992, Daniel Graves asked you if you would like to be co-director of the Florence Academy of Art. How did you two initially meet?
As I mentioned earlier, when I lived in Canada, Stephene and I would come to Europe for holidays. I know Daniel and Charles Cecil from those days, long before I moved to Italy permanently. When Daniel asked if I wanted to be co-director of the Florence Academy of Art, I was pleased as punch! I was very aware of the difficulties of starting anew in a new country, and was delighted to have a job! Mind you, in our first year, Daniel and I made only $2500 (3,000,000 lire) each for the whole year! As I explained previously, Stephene and I brought about $30,000 with us, and I had a couple of major portraits to finish for two companies in the USA.
Daniel and I began the Florence Academy of Art in the gardens of the Corsini Palace (it’s beautiful—it was designed by Buontalenti in the late 1500s). After a few terms, we had more students and needed more space; so, we asked Princess Georgiana Corsini if we could rent more outhouses and convert them into classrooms. She said yes, but when Daniel and I went there to prepare for the students’ arriving the following week, we found that there was no electricity or water in the place. I saw Georgiana walking in the gardens and went to confront her. She said, “John, they were rented to you as is!” and dusted her hands together. I almost punched her in the nose, but somehow managed to tamp down my Manchester instincts and didn’t. Daniel and I then hot-wired the new place by stringing a lot of extension cords across the lawns.
Another story is when a lecture on the over-cleaning of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling was given at the British Institute. Both Charles’s students and ours went. All his students sat on one side of the hall and all of Daniel’s and mine sat on the other. It was like a scene out of West Side Story. It was practically as though we had to check our guns and knives at the door. The lecture was given by Dr James Beck, the famous art historian and founder of ArtWatch. I had heard James being interviewed on the radio about the botched cleaning of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling long before I met him. One statement in particular that stays with me from that radio interview is, “isn’t it strange that most of the dirt was only in the shadow areas?” James’s point (unexplained in the interview) was that if the shadows had not been strengthened with earth colours (dirt) by Michelangelo, the dirt would have adhered uniformly. On the other hand, since Michelangelo certainly overpainted his fresco with glue tempera to deepen the shadows and brighten some colours (blue is not permanent in fresco, for example), then the soot and dirt would definitely favour the gelatinous shadows. It’s little realised that one can overpaint parts of a fresco with glue tempera ten or so days after frescoing that part.
The last time James Beck and I saw each other (he died in 2007) was at lunch at a mutual friend’s place, here in Florence. Afterwards, I walked him and Darma (James’ wife) to their car; we tried to embrace, but Jim and I were each too fat and couldn’t quite get our arms around each other! It was a funny sight, I’m sure.
You taught on alternatives days with Daniel Graves at the Florence Academy of Art between 1992-1995. You mentioned that you both had different approaches to painting which would confuse the students. Can you elaborate on your time teaching together and the relationship you two formed?
Like the Diascuri, Daniel and I didn’t really see each other. He would teach on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I would do Tuesdays and Thursdays (or the other way around). Friday would be looked after by an advanced student. There weren’t that many students at first. By the end of the year, we were depending more and more on student teachers. This was the old atelier way; in the 19th century, the maestro would come in for an hour or two, once or twice every two weeks. The rest of the time, the senior students would wander through the classrooms, giving instruction from time-to-time. Remember that the students didn’t pay back then, it was all free. The ateliers were pretty chaotic at times, with students’ raggings (one student died in a prank in Couture’s atelier), open flirtations and even sword fighting.
Teaching at the Florence Academy of Art together, Daniel and I got along well until the breakup. There are many stories I can recall, but they involve too much booze and too many women. It’s best they remain moot. Back then, Daniel was very much Mr. Sight-Size and advocated the exact copying of nature in both figural work and still-life. He is different now and advocates a more painterly approach, which I applaud. I am more traditional and believed the artist must manipulate what he/she sees in order to create a painting that seems realistic, but is full of life and mood. Sight-Size work encourages a copying approach—the closer you can match the model, a plaster cast for example, the better your painting looks—but what is not realised is that the sculptor who made the statues from which the casts have been taken has already conceptualised the work for the copyist, it has already been made into a work of art; therefore, it works when it’s copied. Copying a cast Sight-Size is marvellous for teaching the student how nuances of value shifts can make a form seem three-dimensional, but it doesn’t teach the student how to draw, how to modify and interpret the subject. A student trained only in Sight-Size is hopelessly lost when faced with drawing and painting nature freehand. While I’m on the subject, Sight-Size is a very late 19th-century invention and was not used in the ateliers or in the academies (for the reasons cited above).
John Collier wrote a book on Sight-Size somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, and the book begins by informing the academy and atelier students that this is something they will not have heard of. I have dozens of photos and reproductions of atelier paintings that show students painting in the classrooms, and nobody in them is working Sight-Size. It is true that Sargent, Whistler, Tallone, de László and others worked Sight-Size for portraits, but their paintings are hardly realistic in the 21st century understanding of the word. It worked for them because they knew how to draw—i.e., manipulate nature—rather than knowing just how to copy. Bouguereau, Leighton and almost every other academician certainly didn’t work Sight-Size.
Back to teaching at the Florence Academy of Art with Daniel; the school went through a normal amount of ups and downs. Remember that this was over 25 years ago and there were only about six or seven major art schools in the world that specialised in Realism (two in Russia, one in China, one in the States and two in Florence). Lots of people wanted to learn how to do this, and students flocked to us. The situation is very different today, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Realist schools throughout the world. We trained a lot of these now-competitors—Taoism nails it: “everything contains the elements of its own destruction.”
The break-up between Daniel and myself was nothing major; not like Daniel and Charles’s, who hated each other and did not speak for many, many years. It’s all water under the bridge, now. Frankly, it was mainly the students who had split us into two camps. Charles and I would run into each other once in a while (I had an apartment below Charles’s for a few years), and Charles would tell me that I wasn’t the problem (meaning that it was Daniel who was the problem, in his opinion). The three of us go to various openings of shows nowadays, but not together as a group. We have a glass of wine there and a brief chinwag.
In 1998, ‘Michael John Angel Studios’ in Florence became the ‘Angel Academy of Art’ in its first location, as you have explained. What area of Florence was the school positioned in at that time?
Our first studios were in Via Fiesolana, but after a few years we had enough students to take a second studio in Via San Niccolò. Jered continued as a full-time teacher, Martinho Correia was with us, teaching for part of the week, and there was sometimes a student teacher as well. We used to walk between the two studios (about a 15-minute walk), each of us teaching in one studio in the mornings and the other studio in the afternoons, then swapping around. Different student levels were in different studios, at different times of the day. For the past 15 years or so, we’ve been housed under one roof, in a large, clean and completely renovated location near Piazza Beccaria.
As I mentioned earlier, when I lived in Canada, Stephene and I would come to Europe for holidays. I know Daniel and Charles Cecil from those days, long before I moved to Italy permanently. When Daniel asked if I wanted to be co-director of the Florence Academy of Art, I was pleased as punch! I was very aware of the difficulties of starting anew in a new country, and was delighted to have a job! Mind you, in our first year, Daniel and I made only $2500 (3,000,000 lire) each for the whole year! As I explained previously, Stephene and I brought about $30,000 with us, and I had a couple of major portraits to finish for two companies in the USA.
Daniel and I began the Florence Academy of Art in the gardens of the Corsini Palace (it’s beautiful—it was designed by Buontalenti in the late 1500s). After a few terms, we had more students and needed more space; so, we asked Princess Georgiana Corsini if we could rent more outhouses and convert them into classrooms. She said yes, but when Daniel and I went there to prepare for the students’ arriving the following week, we found that there was no electricity or water in the place. I saw Georgiana walking in the gardens and went to confront her. She said, “John, they were rented to you as is!” and dusted her hands together. I almost punched her in the nose, but somehow managed to tamp down my Manchester instincts and didn’t. Daniel and I then hot-wired the new place by stringing a lot of extension cords across the lawns.
Another story is when a lecture on the over-cleaning of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling was given at the British Institute. Both Charles’s students and ours went. All his students sat on one side of the hall and all of Daniel’s and mine sat on the other. It was like a scene out of West Side Story. It was practically as though we had to check our guns and knives at the door. The lecture was given by Dr James Beck, the famous art historian and founder of ArtWatch. I had heard James being interviewed on the radio about the botched cleaning of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling long before I met him. One statement in particular that stays with me from that radio interview is, “isn’t it strange that most of the dirt was only in the shadow areas?” James’s point (unexplained in the interview) was that if the shadows had not been strengthened with earth colours (dirt) by Michelangelo, the dirt would have adhered uniformly. On the other hand, since Michelangelo certainly overpainted his fresco with glue tempera to deepen the shadows and brighten some colours (blue is not permanent in fresco, for example), then the soot and dirt would definitely favour the gelatinous shadows. It’s little realised that one can overpaint parts of a fresco with glue tempera ten or so days after frescoing that part.
The last time James Beck and I saw each other (he died in 2007) was at lunch at a mutual friend’s place, here in Florence. Afterwards, I walked him and Darma (James’ wife) to their car; we tried to embrace, but Jim and I were each too fat and couldn’t quite get our arms around each other! It was a funny sight, I’m sure.
You taught on alternatives days with Daniel Graves at the Florence Academy of Art between 1992-1995. You mentioned that you both had different approaches to painting which would confuse the students. Can you elaborate on your time teaching together and the relationship you two formed?
Like the Diascuri, Daniel and I didn’t really see each other. He would teach on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I would do Tuesdays and Thursdays (or the other way around). Friday would be looked after by an advanced student. There weren’t that many students at first. By the end of the year, we were depending more and more on student teachers. This was the old atelier way; in the 19th century, the maestro would come in for an hour or two, once or twice every two weeks. The rest of the time, the senior students would wander through the classrooms, giving instruction from time-to-time. Remember that the students didn’t pay back then, it was all free. The ateliers were pretty chaotic at times, with students’ raggings (one student died in a prank in Couture’s atelier), open flirtations and even sword fighting.
Teaching at the Florence Academy of Art together, Daniel and I got along well until the breakup. There are many stories I can recall, but they involve too much booze and too many women. It’s best they remain moot. Back then, Daniel was very much Mr. Sight-Size and advocated the exact copying of nature in both figural work and still-life. He is different now and advocates a more painterly approach, which I applaud. I am more traditional and believed the artist must manipulate what he/she sees in order to create a painting that seems realistic, but is full of life and mood. Sight-Size work encourages a copying approach—the closer you can match the model, a plaster cast for example, the better your painting looks—but what is not realised is that the sculptor who made the statues from which the casts have been taken has already conceptualised the work for the copyist, it has already been made into a work of art; therefore, it works when it’s copied. Copying a cast Sight-Size is marvellous for teaching the student how nuances of value shifts can make a form seem three-dimensional, but it doesn’t teach the student how to draw, how to modify and interpret the subject. A student trained only in Sight-Size is hopelessly lost when faced with drawing and painting nature freehand. While I’m on the subject, Sight-Size is a very late 19th-century invention and was not used in the ateliers or in the academies (for the reasons cited above).
John Collier wrote a book on Sight-Size somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, and the book begins by informing the academy and atelier students that this is something they will not have heard of. I have dozens of photos and reproductions of atelier paintings that show students painting in the classrooms, and nobody in them is working Sight-Size. It is true that Sargent, Whistler, Tallone, de László and others worked Sight-Size for portraits, but their paintings are hardly realistic in the 21st century understanding of the word. It worked for them because they knew how to draw—i.e., manipulate nature—rather than knowing just how to copy. Bouguereau, Leighton and almost every other academician certainly didn’t work Sight-Size.
Back to teaching at the Florence Academy of Art with Daniel; the school went through a normal amount of ups and downs. Remember that this was over 25 years ago and there were only about six or seven major art schools in the world that specialised in Realism (two in Russia, one in China, one in the States and two in Florence). Lots of people wanted to learn how to do this, and students flocked to us. The situation is very different today, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Realist schools throughout the world. We trained a lot of these now-competitors—Taoism nails it: “everything contains the elements of its own destruction.”
The break-up between Daniel and myself was nothing major; not like Daniel and Charles’s, who hated each other and did not speak for many, many years. It’s all water under the bridge, now. Frankly, it was mainly the students who had split us into two camps. Charles and I would run into each other once in a while (I had an apartment below Charles’s for a few years), and Charles would tell me that I wasn’t the problem (meaning that it was Daniel who was the problem, in his opinion). The three of us go to various openings of shows nowadays, but not together as a group. We have a glass of wine there and a brief chinwag.
In 1998, ‘Michael John Angel Studios’ in Florence became the ‘Angel Academy of Art’ in its first location, as you have explained. What area of Florence was the school positioned in at that time?
Our first studios were in Via Fiesolana, but after a few years we had enough students to take a second studio in Via San Niccolò. Jered continued as a full-time teacher, Martinho Correia was with us, teaching for part of the week, and there was sometimes a student teacher as well. We used to walk between the two studios (about a 15-minute walk), each of us teaching in one studio in the mornings and the other studio in the afternoons, then swapping around. Different student levels were in different studios, at different times of the day. For the past 15 years or so, we’ve been housed under one roof, in a large, clean and completely renovated location near Piazza Beccaria.
Michael John Angel with his studio assistants, Jered Woznicki (left), Ryan (surname unknown, centre) and Mike Grigg (right) in Mr. Angel’s apartment on Via delle Casine in Florence, ITA. c.1995-1996. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Angel Academy of Art logo created by Mr. Angel’s wife, Megan Byrne, using a drawing that Mr. Angel made of a putto by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. c.2009-2014. Digital image, dimensions variable. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Angel Academy of Art logo created by Mr. Angel’s wife, Megan Byrne, using a drawing that Mr. Angel made of a putto by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. c.2009-2014. Digital image, dimensions variable. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
The Angel Academy of Art has today established itself as one of the finest Academies in the world dedicated to the continuance of representational painting. However, you aren’t the only school in Florence that teaches traditional drawing and painting. Contemporaneous to the Angel Academy of Art is the Florence Academy of Art and the Charles H. Cecil Studios, both run by colleagues of yours. These three schools have come to be known as “the big three” in Florence. Throughout the history of all three schools, there has been some healthy rivalry between them. Can you explain what it has been like trying to run the Angel Academy of Art while you have two other world-famous schools of representational art in the same city, as I imagine there would be a lot of competition between you?
We keep each other on our toes, believe me, but it is important to understand that the three of us are different, and the differences increase. Back then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Florence Academy of Art was very much into Sight-Size copying, even from the live model (it still is), while Charles’s school is much enamoured of Baroque painting (Rubens and van Dyck) and teaches a painterly portrait technique while still using Sight-Size. In addition, Charles has an on-going arrangement with the British Institute to keep him supplied with students (he usually has 15 or 20), while we and Daniel depend on our advertising and our reputation in the world to bring in the students. Almost all of Charles’s students come from wealthy upper-class British families, while many of Daniel’s students come from Scandinavia, which pays the students’ fees as government scholarships. The Angel Academy of Art’s students come from all over the world and from all walks of life (assuming they can afford Florence—which isn’t cheap anymore). We have students from Europe, Britain, South America, the USA, Australia, China, Japan, Canada, Africa and Russia.
The mood at the Florence Academy of Art and at Charles H. Cecil Studios is rather dour, while the mood at the Angel Academy of Art is friendly, jocular and definitely familial, while maintaining a serious commitment to learning. Relocating to a bigger space in about 2010 was very helpful, the place is beautiful, practical and puts us all under one roof. I am constantly evolving our programme. When we started, there were only a small handful of specialist Realist schools in the world, but now there are hundreds, if not thousands, as I’ve explained. We must show the world how we are unique, inasmuch as we teach both realistic rendering and pictorial composition, which includes the compositional possibilities inherent in colour—unity, anomaly and field-colour. Colour is taught poorly in the vast majority of schools. Colour comprises three aspects; value, hue and chroma (there’s a fourth one—luminosity—but I’ll leave that alone for now). Of these, value is the key (there’s a saying that value does all the work, and colour gets all the credit!). There are ten or twelve value schemes that most of the zillions of paintings have always been painted in—once one of these value schemes is chosen and fit into one’s design, hue and chroma are superimposed. One such example is what we call the ‘Renaissance Value Scheme,’ onto which the students might place a complimentary hue scheme consisting of red-orange and a greenish blue, as Holbein often did.
We also teach the students how to make a living as a painter. There is a steady market for paintings, but one has to do one’s research (different countries, and parts of countries, buy different subjects—Working Cowboys sell like hotcakes in the South Western United States, but don’t try to sell one in New York; New York likes creepy, quirky subjects, but don’t try to sell one in Chicago) and then apply pretty basic business principles. Ignore the Establishment Market—it has very little to do with professional painting—decide what your chosen market wants, and learn to paint that efficiently and at the highest quality. One can make a very decent living as a professional painter, but it is labour intensive, and the need to produce on schedule is stressful. We usually have about 35 students and five instructors at the Angel Academy of Art.
Although we all run schools of traditional art in Florence, I don’t see Daniel and Charles very often. All three of us are too busy and too old to raise hell anymore. I saw Charles about five years ago when I went to his studio’s open house. He and I then spent the next eight hours drinking and gossiping (the next day, I had no memory of what we talked about—nor do I now! I could barely remember my name).
There are certain terminologies that are used in the Angel Academy of Art to describe different stages of the drawing and painting process. Terminologies such as ‘the construct’ and ‘the articulation’ are used. Do these terminologies have historical significance, or did you coin them yourself?
‘Construct’ is a term in philosophy and it refers to the simplified statement of a line of thinking. I coined the phrase in Canada, 50 years ago, when I realised that a painting is literally made of two-dimensional coloured shapes, in spite of it being made to appear to be comprised of three-dimensional forms. Almost all the books on drawing that I have read begin with creating the illusion of form, which makes for much too difficult a beginning. Nailing the proportions of everything first as two-dimensional, vastly simplified shapes sets the stage for a successful continuance of the more difficult craft of creating three-dimensional illusions. If the two-dimensional proportions are incorrect, the successfully rendered figure will look like a monster.
‘Articulation’ is the rendering of any visible edges in terms of S-curves, C-curves and straight lines, each of which varies in size and, when combined with others, create rhythm. In this, we follow the 19th-century academy method as was illustrated in Charles Bargue’s figure drawings. ‘1st-Painting’ and ‘2nd-Painting’ are 17th-century terms explained by Thomas Bardwell in his book, The Practice of Painting and Perspective Made Easy, published in 1754. I came across it in the National Gallery Library in London, but it is now back in print. Nowadays, younger painters such as Scott Waddell and Joshua LaRock are using the terms ‘1st-Pass’ and ‘2nd-Pass,’ but the meaning is roughly the same. ‘Field-colour’ is the overall colouration of a painting, as opposed to its hue scheme. This is a huge mood-setter in a painting. Other terms we use, such as ‘fugue,’ ‘counter-point’ and ‘rhythm,’ are mostly taken from music. Annigoni used to say that there is only one art, meaning that painting, dance, music and writing are all constructed on the same abstract principles.
We keep each other on our toes, believe me, but it is important to understand that the three of us are different, and the differences increase. Back then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Florence Academy of Art was very much into Sight-Size copying, even from the live model (it still is), while Charles’s school is much enamoured of Baroque painting (Rubens and van Dyck) and teaches a painterly portrait technique while still using Sight-Size. In addition, Charles has an on-going arrangement with the British Institute to keep him supplied with students (he usually has 15 or 20), while we and Daniel depend on our advertising and our reputation in the world to bring in the students. Almost all of Charles’s students come from wealthy upper-class British families, while many of Daniel’s students come from Scandinavia, which pays the students’ fees as government scholarships. The Angel Academy of Art’s students come from all over the world and from all walks of life (assuming they can afford Florence—which isn’t cheap anymore). We have students from Europe, Britain, South America, the USA, Australia, China, Japan, Canada, Africa and Russia.
The mood at the Florence Academy of Art and at Charles H. Cecil Studios is rather dour, while the mood at the Angel Academy of Art is friendly, jocular and definitely familial, while maintaining a serious commitment to learning. Relocating to a bigger space in about 2010 was very helpful, the place is beautiful, practical and puts us all under one roof. I am constantly evolving our programme. When we started, there were only a small handful of specialist Realist schools in the world, but now there are hundreds, if not thousands, as I’ve explained. We must show the world how we are unique, inasmuch as we teach both realistic rendering and pictorial composition, which includes the compositional possibilities inherent in colour—unity, anomaly and field-colour. Colour is taught poorly in the vast majority of schools. Colour comprises three aspects; value, hue and chroma (there’s a fourth one—luminosity—but I’ll leave that alone for now). Of these, value is the key (there’s a saying that value does all the work, and colour gets all the credit!). There are ten or twelve value schemes that most of the zillions of paintings have always been painted in—once one of these value schemes is chosen and fit into one’s design, hue and chroma are superimposed. One such example is what we call the ‘Renaissance Value Scheme,’ onto which the students might place a complimentary hue scheme consisting of red-orange and a greenish blue, as Holbein often did.
We also teach the students how to make a living as a painter. There is a steady market for paintings, but one has to do one’s research (different countries, and parts of countries, buy different subjects—Working Cowboys sell like hotcakes in the South Western United States, but don’t try to sell one in New York; New York likes creepy, quirky subjects, but don’t try to sell one in Chicago) and then apply pretty basic business principles. Ignore the Establishment Market—it has very little to do with professional painting—decide what your chosen market wants, and learn to paint that efficiently and at the highest quality. One can make a very decent living as a professional painter, but it is labour intensive, and the need to produce on schedule is stressful. We usually have about 35 students and five instructors at the Angel Academy of Art.
Although we all run schools of traditional art in Florence, I don’t see Daniel and Charles very often. All three of us are too busy and too old to raise hell anymore. I saw Charles about five years ago when I went to his studio’s open house. He and I then spent the next eight hours drinking and gossiping (the next day, I had no memory of what we talked about—nor do I now! I could barely remember my name).
There are certain terminologies that are used in the Angel Academy of Art to describe different stages of the drawing and painting process. Terminologies such as ‘the construct’ and ‘the articulation’ are used. Do these terminologies have historical significance, or did you coin them yourself?
‘Construct’ is a term in philosophy and it refers to the simplified statement of a line of thinking. I coined the phrase in Canada, 50 years ago, when I realised that a painting is literally made of two-dimensional coloured shapes, in spite of it being made to appear to be comprised of three-dimensional forms. Almost all the books on drawing that I have read begin with creating the illusion of form, which makes for much too difficult a beginning. Nailing the proportions of everything first as two-dimensional, vastly simplified shapes sets the stage for a successful continuance of the more difficult craft of creating three-dimensional illusions. If the two-dimensional proportions are incorrect, the successfully rendered figure will look like a monster.
‘Articulation’ is the rendering of any visible edges in terms of S-curves, C-curves and straight lines, each of which varies in size and, when combined with others, create rhythm. In this, we follow the 19th-century academy method as was illustrated in Charles Bargue’s figure drawings. ‘1st-Painting’ and ‘2nd-Painting’ are 17th-century terms explained by Thomas Bardwell in his book, The Practice of Painting and Perspective Made Easy, published in 1754. I came across it in the National Gallery Library in London, but it is now back in print. Nowadays, younger painters such as Scott Waddell and Joshua LaRock are using the terms ‘1st-Pass’ and ‘2nd-Pass,’ but the meaning is roughly the same. ‘Field-colour’ is the overall colouration of a painting, as opposed to its hue scheme. This is a huge mood-setter in a painting. Other terms we use, such as ‘fugue,’ ‘counter-point’ and ‘rhythm,’ are mostly taken from music. Annigoni used to say that there is only one art, meaning that painting, dance, music and writing are all constructed on the same abstract principles.
Charles Bargue, Plate III, 19 (details, annotated by Mr. Angel), 1868-1871. Lithographic print on paper (reproduction), 18” x 24”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
3-step Process: Gestural Construct, Construct, Syncopated Outline, c.1995. Pencil on paper, 12” x 10”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
3-step Process: Gestural Construct, Construct, Syncopated Outline, c.1995. Pencil on paper, 12” x 10”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
The Angel Academy of Art is especially known for its emphasis on gesture when drawing and painting the figure. Why did you wish to make gesture a particular focus in Angel Academy of Art’s curriculum?
This comes back to the basis of the split between Daniel and me; back then, Daniel advocated a straightforward copying of nature, while I maintained that we were an art school and that somewhere along the line we should be teaching art. The main reason why most Realism today is so dire is that the artists haven’t been taught how to make a picture. Gesture is one of these things, but there are many other factors, too. I am currently writing a book on Pictorial Composition, which I hope to have finished next year—it is an art that is rather too complicated to describe here, but its various aspects can be seen in the Chapter Index.
This comes back to the basis of the split between Daniel and me; back then, Daniel advocated a straightforward copying of nature, while I maintained that we were an art school and that somewhere along the line we should be teaching art. The main reason why most Realism today is so dire is that the artists haven’t been taught how to make a picture. Gesture is one of these things, but there are many other factors, too. I am currently writing a book on Pictorial Composition, which I hope to have finished next year—it is an art that is rather too complicated to describe here, but its various aspects can be seen in the Chapter Index.
Chapter index from Michael John Angel’s forthcoming book titled: The Principles of Pictorial Composition. Due for publication in 2025. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
The Angel Academy of Art is said to hold Bouguereau as an exemplar due to his gestural figures, rhythmic compositional arrangements, superb skin tones and idealised modelling which focuses on the notion that ‘less is more.’ Is the workmanship of Bouguereau something which you encourage students to aspire to?
Bouguereau was a brilliant painter, trained in the old way. He is by no means the only one, of course; there is also Cavé, Bonheur, Bonnat, Cabanal, Amory-Duval, Delaroche, Bastien-Lepage, Dagnan-Bouveret, Mengin, Debat-Ponsan, Friant, Ciseri, Grosso, Gordigiani, Barabini, Nono, Ussi, Tito, Leighton, Soloman Soloman, Moore, Collier, Draper, Alma-Tadema, Godward and a zillion more. We learn from what all these painters have in common, which is how to make a picture. An important thing to remember is that the great 19th century academy painters tried to look at nature through the eyes of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This means, among other things, that the artist should simplify forms to their basic Reality, not simply copy nature. This is how the ancients managed to convey a sense of the Eternal in their works.
I vividly recall seeing some of Bouguereau’s figural constructs from The Education of Bacchus. Studying these constructs, one really gets a sense of how Bouguereau invents and does not simply copy nature—almost nobody can bend like the model does in those studies, and no model could hold such a pose for long enough! Many of the 19th-century academicians worked from photos, which multiplied by thousands the number of poses available from which they could work. A pose that couldn’t be held for even a single sitting can be photographed in a fraction of a second. That photographed pose was then further modified by the artist’s imagination, of course.
At the Angel Academy of Art, the construct goes through two distinct stages; the gestural construct and the finished construct. These stages are followed by the articulation of the edges. The idea of idealised modelling which focuses on ‘less is more’ which you refer to in your question is usually attributed to Whistler (he used the expression in his famous Ten O’Clock Lecture), but he picked it up from a 19th-century newspaper critic (whose name I can’t think of—ah, the irritating sides of old age!), who probably took it from a poem by Tennyson. In classic Realism, the existence of too many details goes against the psychology of seeing; when a person looks at something, he/she doesn’t notice a ton of details. The inclusion of a plethora of details does not represent what something looks like to a viewer. The amount of detail also depends on what one thinks is important; details or form. A concentration of details (such as we see in Photorealism) weakens the illusion of form. There are five or six different kinds of Realism today; there is Photorealism which emphasises detail, and 19th-century classic Realism, such as the realism of Bouguereau, which is unphotographic and stresses the form. I have seen many different styles of realism from all over the world through my experience in judging the annual International Art Renewal Center’s Salon Competition.
Bouguereau was a brilliant painter, trained in the old way. He is by no means the only one, of course; there is also Cavé, Bonheur, Bonnat, Cabanal, Amory-Duval, Delaroche, Bastien-Lepage, Dagnan-Bouveret, Mengin, Debat-Ponsan, Friant, Ciseri, Grosso, Gordigiani, Barabini, Nono, Ussi, Tito, Leighton, Soloman Soloman, Moore, Collier, Draper, Alma-Tadema, Godward and a zillion more. We learn from what all these painters have in common, which is how to make a picture. An important thing to remember is that the great 19th century academy painters tried to look at nature through the eyes of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This means, among other things, that the artist should simplify forms to their basic Reality, not simply copy nature. This is how the ancients managed to convey a sense of the Eternal in their works.
I vividly recall seeing some of Bouguereau’s figural constructs from The Education of Bacchus. Studying these constructs, one really gets a sense of how Bouguereau invents and does not simply copy nature—almost nobody can bend like the model does in those studies, and no model could hold such a pose for long enough! Many of the 19th-century academicians worked from photos, which multiplied by thousands the number of poses available from which they could work. A pose that couldn’t be held for even a single sitting can be photographed in a fraction of a second. That photographed pose was then further modified by the artist’s imagination, of course.
At the Angel Academy of Art, the construct goes through two distinct stages; the gestural construct and the finished construct. These stages are followed by the articulation of the edges. The idea of idealised modelling which focuses on ‘less is more’ which you refer to in your question is usually attributed to Whistler (he used the expression in his famous Ten O’Clock Lecture), but he picked it up from a 19th-century newspaper critic (whose name I can’t think of—ah, the irritating sides of old age!), who probably took it from a poem by Tennyson. In classic Realism, the existence of too many details goes against the psychology of seeing; when a person looks at something, he/she doesn’t notice a ton of details. The inclusion of a plethora of details does not represent what something looks like to a viewer. The amount of detail also depends on what one thinks is important; details or form. A concentration of details (such as we see in Photorealism) weakens the illusion of form. There are five or six different kinds of Realism today; there is Photorealism which emphasises detail, and 19th-century classic Realism, such as the realism of Bouguereau, which is unphotographic and stresses the form. I have seen many different styles of realism from all over the world through my experience in judging the annual International Art Renewal Center’s Salon Competition.
Three stages of a study for Eurydice, 2020. Mixed media on canvas (acrylic for the ground colour, oil for the construct and drybrush stages, and white tempera for the light shapes), 10” x 8” (each). Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Today, would you say that the spirit of Annigoni runs through the Angel Academy of Art, almost as if he is there helping you form the next generation of painters?
It is not generally realised that Annigoni disliked the work of the 19th-century academy painters; so, no. However, I suppose it was really the sentimental aspect that he disliked. I truly love Annigoni as a painter (but only during his English period!) and a rebel; I was awestruck by him as a man, as were we all!
How does the Angel Academy of Art’s system of training painters echo the methodologies taught in academies and ateliers of centuries past?
The easiest way to describe what the 20th century concepts are is to tell you what they are not. They do not advocate a discipline such as a musician has to cultivate. Such a mental and physical discipline is necessary for the Realist painter. Accurate proportion, a syncopated outline that’s interpreted in terms of a rhythmic arrangement of C-curves, S-curves and straight lines, and a thorough understanding of compositional gesture are crucial. Along with this, the Realist painter must have a clear understanding of the complicated technical requirements of paint (particularly oil paint, the most complicated and unforgiving of them all). These are the pre-20th century disciplines which we teach at the Angel Academy: Bargue drawings form the beginning of the learning curve for a Realist painter. They teach the beginnings of the skills of accuracy and realistic rendering that incorporates design. They lay a strong groundwork for the next step, which is charcoal work from the three-dimensional plaster cast. Bargue drawings come in three progressive steps; simple (almost no modelling in the light shapes), more difficult (a more thorough rendering) and very difficult (a lot of rendering and the incorporation of the smaller forms within the context of the big forms).
Uniquely, the Angel Academy follows the teaching methods of the 19th-century academies and ateliers, inasmuch as the students are taught to combine Design and Observation of nature. As I touched on earlier, the 19th-century academy painters were taught to look at nature through the eyes of the classical Greeks and Romans, particularly the eyes of the Hellenistic artists. The students spent a year or more working from classical sculpture, in order to learn how the classical artists thought. It is this combination of Empiricism and Conceptualism that is/was so important. The artist does not simply copy nature, but looks at nature and asks himself/herself, “How can I manipulate what I’m seeing and make a work of art?” Any apparent Naturalism is, indeed, the result of a design process—the art that hides the art.
The one way in which we differ from the teachings of the 19th-century academies is in our use of Sight-Size. I continue to stress this point; I have JPEG’s of hundreds of photographs and paintings of students working in the 19th-century academies and ateliers (and earlier)—and nobody was working Sight-Size. Sight-Size from sculptural casts is an excellent way for the students to learn how to create the illusion of form; however, it does not teach students how to create a painting. It rather tends to hinder the students’ ability to create a painting, by encouraging the student to only draw and paint what he/she sees, rather than to interpret what they see. As I have explained previously, Sight-Size works with casts because the sculptor of the original work has already conceptualised the forms.
I recommend any of Juliette Aristides’s books on the atelier process (some of my step-by-step demonstrations are in the books), as well as Steve Huston’s Figure Drawing for Artists, to give you an idea of what is involved. Harold Speed’s The Practice and Science of Drawing is one of the classics. The best book for painters on anatomy is Anatomy for Sculptors by Uldis Zarins and Sandis Kondrats—it is the best because it stresses morphology (the shape and form of things).
How would you describe the Angel Academy of Art’s approach to studying anatomy?
Anatomy is currently taught to first-year students by Martinho Correia, but an understanding of morphology—also taught by Martinho (and by me in my online composition classes), is much more important for the painter. Once the morphology has been mastered, the student can go on and learn the anatomy (that which creates these masses), if he/she is interested.
We used to have an out-of-house écorché class, given by Jason Arkles, and it was marvellous, but Jason became too busy to continue it. We also give anatomy lectures at La Specola, the natural history museum in Florence, once in a while. These are given by one of our drawing instructors. Our students make five finished studies from the cast, two in charcoal, one en grisaille and two in full colour. The final colour-cast painting is often made from an écorché cast such as Houdon’s Flayed Figure. As I stated above, for the visual artist, however, morphology is more important than anatomy. One must know the forms of the body parts before knowing what is causing those forms to exist. Morphology is taught in our academy on an ongoing basis.
It is not generally realised that Annigoni disliked the work of the 19th-century academy painters; so, no. However, I suppose it was really the sentimental aspect that he disliked. I truly love Annigoni as a painter (but only during his English period!) and a rebel; I was awestruck by him as a man, as were we all!
How does the Angel Academy of Art’s system of training painters echo the methodologies taught in academies and ateliers of centuries past?
The easiest way to describe what the 20th century concepts are is to tell you what they are not. They do not advocate a discipline such as a musician has to cultivate. Such a mental and physical discipline is necessary for the Realist painter. Accurate proportion, a syncopated outline that’s interpreted in terms of a rhythmic arrangement of C-curves, S-curves and straight lines, and a thorough understanding of compositional gesture are crucial. Along with this, the Realist painter must have a clear understanding of the complicated technical requirements of paint (particularly oil paint, the most complicated and unforgiving of them all). These are the pre-20th century disciplines which we teach at the Angel Academy: Bargue drawings form the beginning of the learning curve for a Realist painter. They teach the beginnings of the skills of accuracy and realistic rendering that incorporates design. They lay a strong groundwork for the next step, which is charcoal work from the three-dimensional plaster cast. Bargue drawings come in three progressive steps; simple (almost no modelling in the light shapes), more difficult (a more thorough rendering) and very difficult (a lot of rendering and the incorporation of the smaller forms within the context of the big forms).
Uniquely, the Angel Academy follows the teaching methods of the 19th-century academies and ateliers, inasmuch as the students are taught to combine Design and Observation of nature. As I touched on earlier, the 19th-century academy painters were taught to look at nature through the eyes of the classical Greeks and Romans, particularly the eyes of the Hellenistic artists. The students spent a year or more working from classical sculpture, in order to learn how the classical artists thought. It is this combination of Empiricism and Conceptualism that is/was so important. The artist does not simply copy nature, but looks at nature and asks himself/herself, “How can I manipulate what I’m seeing and make a work of art?” Any apparent Naturalism is, indeed, the result of a design process—the art that hides the art.
The one way in which we differ from the teachings of the 19th-century academies is in our use of Sight-Size. I continue to stress this point; I have JPEG’s of hundreds of photographs and paintings of students working in the 19th-century academies and ateliers (and earlier)—and nobody was working Sight-Size. Sight-Size from sculptural casts is an excellent way for the students to learn how to create the illusion of form; however, it does not teach students how to create a painting. It rather tends to hinder the students’ ability to create a painting, by encouraging the student to only draw and paint what he/she sees, rather than to interpret what they see. As I have explained previously, Sight-Size works with casts because the sculptor of the original work has already conceptualised the forms.
I recommend any of Juliette Aristides’s books on the atelier process (some of my step-by-step demonstrations are in the books), as well as Steve Huston’s Figure Drawing for Artists, to give you an idea of what is involved. Harold Speed’s The Practice and Science of Drawing is one of the classics. The best book for painters on anatomy is Anatomy for Sculptors by Uldis Zarins and Sandis Kondrats—it is the best because it stresses morphology (the shape and form of things).
How would you describe the Angel Academy of Art’s approach to studying anatomy?
Anatomy is currently taught to first-year students by Martinho Correia, but an understanding of morphology—also taught by Martinho (and by me in my online composition classes), is much more important for the painter. Once the morphology has been mastered, the student can go on and learn the anatomy (that which creates these masses), if he/she is interested.
We used to have an out-of-house écorché class, given by Jason Arkles, and it was marvellous, but Jason became too busy to continue it. We also give anatomy lectures at La Specola, the natural history museum in Florence, once in a while. These are given by one of our drawing instructors. Our students make five finished studies from the cast, two in charcoal, one en grisaille and two in full colour. The final colour-cast painting is often made from an écorché cast such as Houdon’s Flayed Figure. As I stated above, for the visual artist, however, morphology is more important than anatomy. One must know the forms of the body parts before knowing what is causing those forms to exist. Morphology is taught in our academy on an ongoing basis.
The Angel Academy of Art anatomy class at Jason Arkles’ studio in Florence, ITA. c.2012-2015. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Julie Tsang Kavanagh, Écorché, 2005. Oil on canvas, 32” x 16”. Collection of the artist, San Francisco, USA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Julie Tsang Kavanagh, Écorché, 2005. Oil on canvas, 32” x 16”. Collection of the artist, San Francisco, USA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Currently, the Angel Academy of Art does not offer a sculpture program. What has been your reasoning behind this?
We are a specialist school that teaches realistic, representational painting. Even though our studios are large, the students need all the space to properly learn the art of painting.
Throughout art history, some painters have been successful in creating sculpture along with their paintings. Artists such as Jean-Leon Gerome come to mind. Annigoni himself also spent some time studying sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence when he was a student there in 1927. Learning the craft of painting itself is a complex discipline which requires many years of repetitious practice to develop proficiency. In considering this, do you think it is possible for a painter today to also be capable of producing fine figurative sculpture or are the two disciplines of painting and sculpture too different to be studied and pursued simultaneously and mastered in one lifetime?
Studying sculpting is helpful to a painter’s understanding of morphology, but is by no means necessary. It is much more important (and much more difficult) for the wannabe painters to spend their time learning how to master the creation of illusionary forms on a two-dimensional surface.
The superiority of the fine arts of painting and sculpture have been debated for centuries. For instance, Michelangelo had a rather low opinion on the art of painting as opposed to sculpture. Some artists debate whether painting is harder than sculpture or vice-versa. What is your take on this dispute?
Michelangelo was a brilliant early-Romantic sculptor—his work is full of expressive gesture—but he was not a great painter when judged by modern Realist standards. Most modern Realists would rather paint like Leighton or Sargent than paint like Michelangelo or Vasari. My own training didn’t involve sculpture; however, I did a little sculpture in Italy when I was in my 20s, and painting is much harder, as it involves creating an illusion of form and, unlike (monochrome) sculpture, it requires the artist to harmonise and draw with colour and deal with a plethora of hues. Mind you, all art is difficult.
Would you say that the curriculum you teach at the Angel Academy of Art is a direct mimesis of nineteenth century studio practice, or have you amended it to suit your own philosophy of teaching?
It’s mostly based on the 19th century practices (as I understand them), which I have already outlined. There have to be differences, though. The 19th century training lasted at least seven years, and this is not economically viable these days, particularly here, given how very expensive Florence has become, even for Italians. A foreigner cannot find even a drab one-room apartment for under €800 (my rent, for example, is 1800€ a month). For this reason, we have had to eliminate some things from our curriculum—Perspective being one example.
The 19th century structure was different from today’s; a student learned charcoal drawing and the science of art (composition, anatomy & perspective) at the academies (such as the École des Beaux-Arts or the Munich Academy), and studied painting at an atelier under a master whose style the student wanted to emulate. Both the academies and the ateliers were open to students of all ages, and were free of charge. The master wasn’t paid—it was considered a duty to the promulgation of the art of painting—and he came in only one or two times a fortnight for an hour each time.
We are a specialist school that teaches realistic, representational painting. Even though our studios are large, the students need all the space to properly learn the art of painting.
Throughout art history, some painters have been successful in creating sculpture along with their paintings. Artists such as Jean-Leon Gerome come to mind. Annigoni himself also spent some time studying sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence when he was a student there in 1927. Learning the craft of painting itself is a complex discipline which requires many years of repetitious practice to develop proficiency. In considering this, do you think it is possible for a painter today to also be capable of producing fine figurative sculpture or are the two disciplines of painting and sculpture too different to be studied and pursued simultaneously and mastered in one lifetime?
Studying sculpting is helpful to a painter’s understanding of morphology, but is by no means necessary. It is much more important (and much more difficult) for the wannabe painters to spend their time learning how to master the creation of illusionary forms on a two-dimensional surface.
The superiority of the fine arts of painting and sculpture have been debated for centuries. For instance, Michelangelo had a rather low opinion on the art of painting as opposed to sculpture. Some artists debate whether painting is harder than sculpture or vice-versa. What is your take on this dispute?
Michelangelo was a brilliant early-Romantic sculptor—his work is full of expressive gesture—but he was not a great painter when judged by modern Realist standards. Most modern Realists would rather paint like Leighton or Sargent than paint like Michelangelo or Vasari. My own training didn’t involve sculpture; however, I did a little sculpture in Italy when I was in my 20s, and painting is much harder, as it involves creating an illusion of form and, unlike (monochrome) sculpture, it requires the artist to harmonise and draw with colour and deal with a plethora of hues. Mind you, all art is difficult.
Would you say that the curriculum you teach at the Angel Academy of Art is a direct mimesis of nineteenth century studio practice, or have you amended it to suit your own philosophy of teaching?
It’s mostly based on the 19th century practices (as I understand them), which I have already outlined. There have to be differences, though. The 19th century training lasted at least seven years, and this is not economically viable these days, particularly here, given how very expensive Florence has become, even for Italians. A foreigner cannot find even a drab one-room apartment for under €800 (my rent, for example, is 1800€ a month). For this reason, we have had to eliminate some things from our curriculum—Perspective being one example.
The 19th century structure was different from today’s; a student learned charcoal drawing and the science of art (composition, anatomy & perspective) at the academies (such as the École des Beaux-Arts or the Munich Academy), and studied painting at an atelier under a master whose style the student wanted to emulate. Both the academies and the ateliers were open to students of all ages, and were free of charge. The master wasn’t paid—it was considered a duty to the promulgation of the art of painting—and he came in only one or two times a fortnight for an hour each time.
Anatomy of the Arm, 1975. Carbon pencil on paper, 10” x 8” (each). Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
After so many years of teaching and painting, how would you describe the ideal system of training a painter?
By “ideal,” I assume you mean “best possible.” The ideal system is not viable. The best system would be an 8 or 9-year programme that had a curriculum such as that at our academy. Pictorial composition (including colour design), figural design, practical colour, drawing with paint and accurate, as well as interpretive, proportion are all very important. Usually, the student finally starts to actually understand things in the third year with us—if they could stay longer, they would become masters. Shane Wolf, for example, was with us for five years.
There is a reoccurring green background which plaster casts are placed before when students approach cast painting at the Angel Academy of Art. What is the significance of the background coloured in this tone of green?
A mid-value grey-green is the colour of the walls in the studios (we have four in-house studios; two live-model studios, one large cast studio and a still-life studio). Grey-green is an excellent colour to off-set the model’s skin colour (although Leighton’s studio was a mid-tone deep red). It is a practical colour for cast painting—plaster casts comprise very low-chroma colours, and a warm hue background would want to come forward visually unless it were very drab. Grey-blue is too depressing and too close to grisaille; so, grey-green seems a good solution. Granted, the painter must learn how to keep all colours receding when that is required, but that is one (small) part of practical colour composition, not of cast study. Sight-Size casts are to teach the student how to render form, and that’s difficult enough without complicating it with compositional problems. Studies from casts also demonstrate to the student how the sculptor has conceptualised (a.k.a. designed) the forms of the human body, face and drapery.
Looking at your oeuvre, it is clear that you are principally concerned with portraiture and the figure. However, there seems to be a lack of still life and landscape in your body of work. Why is this so?
I am really only interested in painting the human figure. I became a portrait painter as it is the only practical way to get close to painting the figure. Don’t misunderstand me, portrait painting is one of the highest arts (70% of the world’s great masterpieces are portraits, as Richard Maury once pointed out to me), but the clients tend to get in the way. All professional designers say that their job would be perfect, if only they could eliminate the client. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “Hell is other people.” I prefer it stated as, “Other people spoil everything.” I have painted landscapes and some still lifes, but they don’t interest me as something to do regularly. I very much enjoy looking at landscape paintings, mind you, and I think David Leffel’s still lifes are truly beautiful. Things are changing, thank the Gods, the nude is coming back (mainly in fantasy paintings and 2D design).
For some painters, their subject matter changes depending on the time of year. For instance, in the winter, because of the grim light in certain parts of the world, they focus on studio paintings (still lives and figurative work) and then when spring comes, they switch to landscape. Do you find that you approach your work in this manner?
Please forgive an old man’s pedantry, the plural of still life is ‘still lifes’—although my spellcheck hates it—and figurative means representational and should not be confused with figural, which means pertaining only to the human figure. A figure painting, a still life and a landscape are all figurative works. As I wrote above, I don’t paint landscapes unless it’s part of a figural piece. Degas (who was famously mean and witty) once remarked that the gendarmerie should arrest painters found painting outdoors.
You have stated, “still life is the best arena in which to study colour, texture and the illusion of space.” Are you able to explain why this is so?
The emphasis here is on study. Casts have a very small range of hues and chromas, and figural work is also limited. Still-life objects, on the other hand, have a range of hues and chromas—their local colours range from extremely high to very, very low chroma. They have a range of textures, too. Some are rough (brick, stone & some ceramic), while others are smooth. Some are shiny, others are matt. Still lifes comprise objects at various distances from the picture plane, whereas the live model has nothing, or next to nothing, behind him/her. The same is true, in spades, for cast work, although, our third cast painting at the Angel Academy of Art acts as a segue into still life, and contains a still-life element, such as wood or drapery.
By “ideal,” I assume you mean “best possible.” The ideal system is not viable. The best system would be an 8 or 9-year programme that had a curriculum such as that at our academy. Pictorial composition (including colour design), figural design, practical colour, drawing with paint and accurate, as well as interpretive, proportion are all very important. Usually, the student finally starts to actually understand things in the third year with us—if they could stay longer, they would become masters. Shane Wolf, for example, was with us for five years.
There is a reoccurring green background which plaster casts are placed before when students approach cast painting at the Angel Academy of Art. What is the significance of the background coloured in this tone of green?
A mid-value grey-green is the colour of the walls in the studios (we have four in-house studios; two live-model studios, one large cast studio and a still-life studio). Grey-green is an excellent colour to off-set the model’s skin colour (although Leighton’s studio was a mid-tone deep red). It is a practical colour for cast painting—plaster casts comprise very low-chroma colours, and a warm hue background would want to come forward visually unless it were very drab. Grey-blue is too depressing and too close to grisaille; so, grey-green seems a good solution. Granted, the painter must learn how to keep all colours receding when that is required, but that is one (small) part of practical colour composition, not of cast study. Sight-Size casts are to teach the student how to render form, and that’s difficult enough without complicating it with compositional problems. Studies from casts also demonstrate to the student how the sculptor has conceptualised (a.k.a. designed) the forms of the human body, face and drapery.
Looking at your oeuvre, it is clear that you are principally concerned with portraiture and the figure. However, there seems to be a lack of still life and landscape in your body of work. Why is this so?
I am really only interested in painting the human figure. I became a portrait painter as it is the only practical way to get close to painting the figure. Don’t misunderstand me, portrait painting is one of the highest arts (70% of the world’s great masterpieces are portraits, as Richard Maury once pointed out to me), but the clients tend to get in the way. All professional designers say that their job would be perfect, if only they could eliminate the client. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “Hell is other people.” I prefer it stated as, “Other people spoil everything.” I have painted landscapes and some still lifes, but they don’t interest me as something to do regularly. I very much enjoy looking at landscape paintings, mind you, and I think David Leffel’s still lifes are truly beautiful. Things are changing, thank the Gods, the nude is coming back (mainly in fantasy paintings and 2D design).
For some painters, their subject matter changes depending on the time of year. For instance, in the winter, because of the grim light in certain parts of the world, they focus on studio paintings (still lives and figurative work) and then when spring comes, they switch to landscape. Do you find that you approach your work in this manner?
Please forgive an old man’s pedantry, the plural of still life is ‘still lifes’—although my spellcheck hates it—and figurative means representational and should not be confused with figural, which means pertaining only to the human figure. A figure painting, a still life and a landscape are all figurative works. As I wrote above, I don’t paint landscapes unless it’s part of a figural piece. Degas (who was famously mean and witty) once remarked that the gendarmerie should arrest painters found painting outdoors.
You have stated, “still life is the best arena in which to study colour, texture and the illusion of space.” Are you able to explain why this is so?
The emphasis here is on study. Casts have a very small range of hues and chromas, and figural work is also limited. Still-life objects, on the other hand, have a range of hues and chromas—their local colours range from extremely high to very, very low chroma. They have a range of textures, too. Some are rough (brick, stone & some ceramic), while others are smooth. Some are shiny, others are matt. Still lifes comprise objects at various distances from the picture plane, whereas the live model has nothing, or next to nothing, behind him/her. The same is true, in spades, for cast work, although, our third cast painting at the Angel Academy of Art acts as a segue into still life, and contains a still-life element, such as wood or drapery.
The Sleeping Magdalene, 2004 (unfinished). Oil on canvas, 30” x 71”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Luigi Ringressi, 2011. Oil on canvas, 32” x 26”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Luigi Ringressi, 2011. Oil on canvas, 32” x 26”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Prior to 1863, the academicians of the Ecole des Beaux Arts recommended hatching in pencil be used to model tone in drawings, however, after the academy’s reformation in 1863 charcoal became the preferred medium for rendering and the use of the drawing stump took hold. What is your opinion on this shift, and do you believe there is an advantage to using one method over the other?
Charcoal is best for a painter, although some excellent artists today, such as Stephen Bauman, like graphite. Annigoni used Wolff’s Carbon Pencils (or pastel, or mixed media). The best charcoal is Nitram. I don’t recommend charcoal or pencil be used as an underdrawing for a painting, though. Paint is best. At the Angel Academy of Art, we start the student drawing with paint earlier than other academies do—paint is different from either pencil or charcoal, and needs a different way of thinking and a different mind-set. Too long a time with charcoal hinders one’s ability to draw with colour. If the student stays with charcoal too long, he/she becomes imbued with bad habits that are difficult to break. For example, charcoal doesn’t teach the student to be aware of the alliance between chroma and value; the greyer the colour, the darker it looks, even though the absolute value hasn’t changed. The apparent value has, however. Charcoal doesn’t prepare one for this; in fact, it makes the understanding of it much harder.
You stand by the belief that the best set of drawing models we have in existence today are those created by Charles Bargue in collaboration with Jean Leon Gerome. What is your opinion on the drawing plates created by Bernard Romain Julien and how do they compare to those create by Bargue and Gerome?
Bargues are the best, by far, because they teach realistic form, rather than a stylistic one (the Baroque or Rococo style, for example). However, it is important that the student sees these earlier drawing models, as they illustrate more obviously the design aspect that the artist must extrapolate from nature.
The red chalk (sanguine) that distinguishes Michelangelo’s drawings was a favoured drawing medium in the Renaissance, however, it was seldom used by the nineteenth century academies and ateliers. Why do you believe this to be the case?
Red chalk doesn’t have the value range that charcoal has. Michelangelo made these drawings as finished works that he gave to patrons and friends—they were not intended to explore form; in fact, they’re pretty two-dimensional, since the high-chroma of the shadows stops them turning. Waterhouse liked using red chalk, and the effect is lovely (I’m a huge fan of Waterhouse’s work), but he did his form drawing on the canvas, with paint. The painter draws with colour, which is another reason for moving the student on to drawing with paint as soon as possible (first, drybrush, then grisaille, and then colour).
Some realist painters wish to stay as true as possible to the materials of the past when it comes to supports, mediums, pigments, and brushes. There are even some who will choose to paint on copper/brass like a number of the early masters did. Nowadays, modern chemistry has resulted in new chemicals, pigments, and synthetic hair brushes being developed that some painters have embraced and others have rejected. How much emphasis do you place on the materials used in the craft of drawing and painting?
The materials we have today are much, much better than the Old People had. They used what they used because they were the best materials available to them. Whenever a new material came on the market, they switched to it. If they hadn’t used new and better materials, we’d all still be painting in caves. Canaletto refused to paint if—the then new—Prussian blue was unobtainable. Using old yellowing materials because the Old Painters used them is rather like worshiping religious relics. It is the old materials that have made the Old People’s paintings darken, yellow and crack.
An exception would be a material whose handling properties cannot be emulated, i.e., is still the best available to us. Many painters still use lead white (flake white, cremnitz white, silver white—it has many names) because of its handling properties and it’s fast drying. However, it is possible to emulate the properties of lead white with a combination of titanium white, Liquin (which is a synthetic hard varnish), calcium carbonate and titanium dioxide in powder form. This creates a white that is thixotropic, fast-drying, flexible and almost never yellowing. I have samples of it that I have kept in a dark drawer for 30 years, and they are unchanged. A restorer at the National Gallery in London told me once, “John, there’s an awful lot of research that goes into these things.” I’ve never worked on copper; therefore, I have no opinions on it. Rembrandt used it, I know, but I don’t see the point. People tell me that it gives a lovely glow to the painting.
Charcoal is best for a painter, although some excellent artists today, such as Stephen Bauman, like graphite. Annigoni used Wolff’s Carbon Pencils (or pastel, or mixed media). The best charcoal is Nitram. I don’t recommend charcoal or pencil be used as an underdrawing for a painting, though. Paint is best. At the Angel Academy of Art, we start the student drawing with paint earlier than other academies do—paint is different from either pencil or charcoal, and needs a different way of thinking and a different mind-set. Too long a time with charcoal hinders one’s ability to draw with colour. If the student stays with charcoal too long, he/she becomes imbued with bad habits that are difficult to break. For example, charcoal doesn’t teach the student to be aware of the alliance between chroma and value; the greyer the colour, the darker it looks, even though the absolute value hasn’t changed. The apparent value has, however. Charcoal doesn’t prepare one for this; in fact, it makes the understanding of it much harder.
You stand by the belief that the best set of drawing models we have in existence today are those created by Charles Bargue in collaboration with Jean Leon Gerome. What is your opinion on the drawing plates created by Bernard Romain Julien and how do they compare to those create by Bargue and Gerome?
Bargues are the best, by far, because they teach realistic form, rather than a stylistic one (the Baroque or Rococo style, for example). However, it is important that the student sees these earlier drawing models, as they illustrate more obviously the design aspect that the artist must extrapolate from nature.
The red chalk (sanguine) that distinguishes Michelangelo’s drawings was a favoured drawing medium in the Renaissance, however, it was seldom used by the nineteenth century academies and ateliers. Why do you believe this to be the case?
Red chalk doesn’t have the value range that charcoal has. Michelangelo made these drawings as finished works that he gave to patrons and friends—they were not intended to explore form; in fact, they’re pretty two-dimensional, since the high-chroma of the shadows stops them turning. Waterhouse liked using red chalk, and the effect is lovely (I’m a huge fan of Waterhouse’s work), but he did his form drawing on the canvas, with paint. The painter draws with colour, which is another reason for moving the student on to drawing with paint as soon as possible (first, drybrush, then grisaille, and then colour).
Some realist painters wish to stay as true as possible to the materials of the past when it comes to supports, mediums, pigments, and brushes. There are even some who will choose to paint on copper/brass like a number of the early masters did. Nowadays, modern chemistry has resulted in new chemicals, pigments, and synthetic hair brushes being developed that some painters have embraced and others have rejected. How much emphasis do you place on the materials used in the craft of drawing and painting?
The materials we have today are much, much better than the Old People had. They used what they used because they were the best materials available to them. Whenever a new material came on the market, they switched to it. If they hadn’t used new and better materials, we’d all still be painting in caves. Canaletto refused to paint if—the then new—Prussian blue was unobtainable. Using old yellowing materials because the Old Painters used them is rather like worshiping religious relics. It is the old materials that have made the Old People’s paintings darken, yellow and crack.
An exception would be a material whose handling properties cannot be emulated, i.e., is still the best available to us. Many painters still use lead white (flake white, cremnitz white, silver white—it has many names) because of its handling properties and it’s fast drying. However, it is possible to emulate the properties of lead white with a combination of titanium white, Liquin (which is a synthetic hard varnish), calcium carbonate and titanium dioxide in powder form. This creates a white that is thixotropic, fast-drying, flexible and almost never yellowing. I have samples of it that I have kept in a dark drawer for 30 years, and they are unchanged. A restorer at the National Gallery in London told me once, “John, there’s an awful lot of research that goes into these things.” I’ve never worked on copper; therefore, I have no opinions on it. Rembrandt used it, I know, but I don’t see the point. People tell me that it gives a lovely glow to the painting.
Travis Seymour, Homer, c.2000. Oil on canvas, 28” x 20”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Mark Cummings, L’Amorino, c.2000. Oil on canvas, 28” x 20”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Janne Jääskeläinen, Seneca, c.2000. Oil on canvas, 28” x 20”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Mark Cummings, L’Amorino, c.2000. Oil on canvas, 28” x 20”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Janne Jääskeläinen, Seneca, c.2000. Oil on canvas, 28” x 20”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Observing some of the photos taken of students working in the studios of the Angel Academy of Art, it is evident that the academy trains students to place tacks in the sides of the canvas to fasten it to the stretcher bars rather than wrapping the canvas right around the stretcher bars and then stapling the back. Historically, canvases seem to have been stretched using the former method explained above. Can you elaborate on this approach to stretching canvas?
I prefer to use drawing pins to pin the canvas to the back of the stretcher bars. Drawing pins (thumbtacks in American English) are easy to apply and easy to remove when necessary. It is important to pin the canvas to the back of the stretchers to distribute the “pull” more evenly across the bars. At the Angel Academy of Art, we often pin loose canvas to a drawing board—the dimensions can then be easily adjusted where needed. For expediency’s sake, however, our students buy pre-stretched canvases, and these are usually tacked or stapled on the sides by the manufacturers, which is too bad, but I suppose it’s cheaper (saves canvas) for the manufacturers to do this.
Some of your paintings such as “St. John” are based on religious themes. Many a Renaissance painter painted for the Roman Catholic Church in their day, and many were deeply religious. In fact, during his lifetime, Annigoni is quoted in saying, “I remain nostalgic for God,” as if somewhere in time he was once religious. In his later years, he even painted some frescoes in churches pro-bono, however, throughout his life he maintained his stance as an agnostic. Since the 1980s, you have taken on numerous mural and altarpiece commissions for churches in Italy. Does religion have a place in your own life and what role does it take in the process of painting a religious piece?
I am fascinated by allegory and the allegorical side of mythology, and this includes Christian mythology. I am not a believer in institutional churches (except for their buildings as works of art). Established religions often seem exploitative and closed-minded to me, in spite of the various good things they do for people. If they give comfort to people, that’s great, but I’d rather they helped people find solutions in reality, rather than in imaginary deities and magic incantations. It seems to me that the Bible is written as allegory told in terms of magic; unfortunately, the vast majority of Christians seem unaware of this. Consider the crucifixion story. When (and if) everyman decides to change her/his bad self, the transformation is agonisingly difficult (and often fails). Once this period of mental “crucifixion” is done, one is resurrected into a new self, and the original inadequate person (represented in the Bible by Adam & Eve) is metamorphosed.
This, of course, is my interpretation and by no means universal. I agree with Joseph Campbell that a myth that needs explaining isn’t working. One must ponder the allegory, look inside oneself and find a “solution.” In doing that, one learns about oneself, and that’s the whole point. The allegory itself has no “solution.” Christianity is no more and no less valid than any other collection of ancient stories, and to read them as history rather defeats their purpose. Joseph Campbell again explains that the Virgin Birth has nothing to do with biology, and the Promised Land has nothing to do with real estate. I am also a great fan of Carl Jung’s theories, and I am, if anything, a pantheist.
By the way, I date my paintings from the founding of Rome, not from the supposed birth of Jesus, who I believe to be a fictional character. Anything painted this year, for example, is dated MMDCCLXXIV. Rome has far more to do with my painting than Christianity does, in spite of my finding the Bible’s allegories profound.
I prefer to use drawing pins to pin the canvas to the back of the stretcher bars. Drawing pins (thumbtacks in American English) are easy to apply and easy to remove when necessary. It is important to pin the canvas to the back of the stretchers to distribute the “pull” more evenly across the bars. At the Angel Academy of Art, we often pin loose canvas to a drawing board—the dimensions can then be easily adjusted where needed. For expediency’s sake, however, our students buy pre-stretched canvases, and these are usually tacked or stapled on the sides by the manufacturers, which is too bad, but I suppose it’s cheaper (saves canvas) for the manufacturers to do this.
Some of your paintings such as “St. John” are based on religious themes. Many a Renaissance painter painted for the Roman Catholic Church in their day, and many were deeply religious. In fact, during his lifetime, Annigoni is quoted in saying, “I remain nostalgic for God,” as if somewhere in time he was once religious. In his later years, he even painted some frescoes in churches pro-bono, however, throughout his life he maintained his stance as an agnostic. Since the 1980s, you have taken on numerous mural and altarpiece commissions for churches in Italy. Does religion have a place in your own life and what role does it take in the process of painting a religious piece?
I am fascinated by allegory and the allegorical side of mythology, and this includes Christian mythology. I am not a believer in institutional churches (except for their buildings as works of art). Established religions often seem exploitative and closed-minded to me, in spite of the various good things they do for people. If they give comfort to people, that’s great, but I’d rather they helped people find solutions in reality, rather than in imaginary deities and magic incantations. It seems to me that the Bible is written as allegory told in terms of magic; unfortunately, the vast majority of Christians seem unaware of this. Consider the crucifixion story. When (and if) everyman decides to change her/his bad self, the transformation is agonisingly difficult (and often fails). Once this period of mental “crucifixion” is done, one is resurrected into a new self, and the original inadequate person (represented in the Bible by Adam & Eve) is metamorphosed.
This, of course, is my interpretation and by no means universal. I agree with Joseph Campbell that a myth that needs explaining isn’t working. One must ponder the allegory, look inside oneself and find a “solution.” In doing that, one learns about oneself, and that’s the whole point. The allegory itself has no “solution.” Christianity is no more and no less valid than any other collection of ancient stories, and to read them as history rather defeats their purpose. Joseph Campbell again explains that the Virgin Birth has nothing to do with biology, and the Promised Land has nothing to do with real estate. I am also a great fan of Carl Jung’s theories, and I am, if anything, a pantheist.
By the way, I date my paintings from the founding of Rome, not from the supposed birth of Jesus, who I believe to be a fictional character. Anything painted this year, for example, is dated MMDCCLXXIV. Rome has far more to do with my painting than Christianity does, in spite of my finding the Bible’s allegories profound.
St John the Baptist (work in progress). Oil on canvas, 44” x 34”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Self Portrait at 42 (work in progress). Oil on canvas, 24” x 20”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Self Portrait at 42 (work in progress). Oil on canvas, 24” x 20”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
The Sacred Art School in Florence directed by Giorgio Fozzati is a realist school that also focuses on teaching traditional drawing and painting, which has a particular focus on developing artists who wish to use their work to serve religious means. Have you had any contact with the Sacred Art School and what is your opinion of the school?
I know of them, but I don’t know them. For all I know, they might be brilliant. I should take a look at what they produce.
Are there many prospects for a Realist artist in Florence to receive commissions from churches to create religious pieces?
There is very little market for paintings that cost more than €150 in Italy. As for churches, they rarely pay for anything, they maintain that one works for the good of one’s soul! Annigoni was never paid for his frescoes—he made tons of money from his international portraits and was happy to have church walls on which to paint frescoes. He always said that he lacked the gift of faith—his dad hated the Church, as do many new generation Italians—there has been too long a history of exploitation and misogyny.
Annigoni was wealthy enough, I guess, but was also very generous. He would have Annibale, his studio cleaner, throw money out of the window each day for the paupers, the street people, who would gather below. He lived simply, almost bohemian, but bought and furnished a lovely big apartment in Piazza Santo Spirito after his second marriage. When we were all at Ponte Buggianese, painting the fresco there, Annigoni paid for everything: the hotel, the food and, God knows, the wine!
You must see many young art students passing through your academy every year. Perhaps many have concerned parents upon completing the program as earning a living through painting can indeed be challenging. Do you believe it is actually possible for a painter to earn a living off their work in our day and age, or do you believe the world has become far too digitalised to appreciate the humble craft of drawing and painting?
It’s complicated. There are two types of art markets; the Art Establishment (you’re top-of-the-pops today and a nowhere-man tomorrow) and the professional artist’s market (the artist who paints, draws and sculpts for the majority of people who buy art because they love it). The two markets have little in common. At the Angel Academy of Art, we train professionals. I tell my students that you can sell anything for €1,000,000, as long as you spend €900,000 promoting it. In the professional-artist world, a ‘finished’ still life will sell for between €4000 and €8000—the less the cost, the more sales will be made. Generally speaking, one will sell three such still lifes a year. In addition, one should paint a warm-up sketch every morning to study colour composition, including Mother Colour, or Field Colour, using still life, landscape or a portrait-character sketch to explore these abstract compositional ideas. Each of these studies takes about two hours (practice, practice, practice!), and the more successful ones (say three a week) can be sold for around €350 on a regular basis, once you find an outlet. This is one of the things we teach in our Art Business classes.
Do the arithmetic: 4000 x 3 = 12,000, and 350 x 3 x 50 = 52,500. This adds up to nearly 65,000€ a year. The dealer takes 50%, leaving the artist with €35,000. The government takes 30% of this for income tax, leaving the artist to pocket a clear €23,000 or €25,000. It’s not a fortune, but it is a living (this is net—money in your pocket—remember, not gross). Over time, one can increase one’s prices. Nowadays, too, one can sell online and eliminate the dealer (but add to one’s workload). Professional painting is labour-intensive; it isn’t for lazy people. The more you paint, the more money you’ll make. If one could paint excellent portraits of people’s children for €20 each (for example), one would have more work than one could do in a lifetime. Selling is partly just a matter of finding a viable price for the market (obviously one has to charge more than €20 for a portrait!). None of this applies to abstract painting; people want realistic paintings. The business end of things is much more complicated than this, but that sketches it out.
Over the years, there have been several studio-schools that have been established in Florence which stem from the teachings of the state academy of art in St. Petersburg, Russia. What is your opinion of these schools and the Russian construction-based approach to training painters?
The 19th century Russian academies (St. Petersburg & Moscow) were truly great, but the modern versions are less so. To my mind, realism is a combination of conceptualism (the understanding of morphology; i.e., form and construction) and empirical observation. The modern Russians don’t give enough attention to the empirical side of things, I feel; however, I much prefer their attitude as opposed to the mindless Sight-Size approach so prevalent in today’s ateliers and academies. I am in process of revamping our programme and making it more like the 19th century type of instruction, rather than the 20th century type. In a word, design dominates. Rhythm, flow-through lines, unit repetition, proportion, colour harmony, anomaly and counterpoint. Bargue’s figure drawings, for example, show us how to design the human figure and create rhythmic outlines—S-curves, C-curves, straight lines; long lines, middle length lines and short lines. We need to get the word out about our soon-to-be unique programme.
One of the several reasons that Daniel Graves and I split was because I kept insisting that we were an art school and that we should therefore teach some art, which I explained earlier in the interview. The students, though, just wanted to learn how to copy stuff from nature.
I understand you have a particular love for painting subjects based on myth and allegory. What draws you to these particular subjects and do you find there are painters today who are creating commendable works based on these ideas?
There are many brilliant Realists today. Among these are (in no particular order) Colleen Barry, Roberto Ferri, Cesar Santos, Shane Wolf, the late Richard Schmid, Casey Baugh, Donato Giancola, the late Nelson Shanks, Arantzazu Martinez and Jennifer Gennari. Many of these artists paint allegories, continuing beyond the directions of the Old People, who painted allegories and fantasies based on the Bible’s stories and classical myths. It’s hard to define where one’s inspiration comes from—some painters are inspired by animals, some by scenes in interiors. I, and some like me, are inspired by a more visionary, allegorical approach.
I will add that I like to leave paintings in different stages of completion: they animate the painting and make it more entertaining. They also suggest that the sitter’s life is incomplete and not yet over. This is often evident in my portraits, as is my custom, the clothing and the background are more roughly painted than the face.
As you find yourself getting older, have you noticed that your subject matter is changing with your coming of age, or are you still trying to achieve things in your work which you were pursuing in your younger days?
I am trying to get back to what originally motivated me to paint; fantasies and allegories. The thing is, though, that they take a lot of time and focus, and teaching—which earns me my living these days—allows me very little time. I have several paintings on the easel, but progress is slow.
I know of them, but I don’t know them. For all I know, they might be brilliant. I should take a look at what they produce.
Are there many prospects for a Realist artist in Florence to receive commissions from churches to create religious pieces?
There is very little market for paintings that cost more than €150 in Italy. As for churches, they rarely pay for anything, they maintain that one works for the good of one’s soul! Annigoni was never paid for his frescoes—he made tons of money from his international portraits and was happy to have church walls on which to paint frescoes. He always said that he lacked the gift of faith—his dad hated the Church, as do many new generation Italians—there has been too long a history of exploitation and misogyny.
Annigoni was wealthy enough, I guess, but was also very generous. He would have Annibale, his studio cleaner, throw money out of the window each day for the paupers, the street people, who would gather below. He lived simply, almost bohemian, but bought and furnished a lovely big apartment in Piazza Santo Spirito after his second marriage. When we were all at Ponte Buggianese, painting the fresco there, Annigoni paid for everything: the hotel, the food and, God knows, the wine!
You must see many young art students passing through your academy every year. Perhaps many have concerned parents upon completing the program as earning a living through painting can indeed be challenging. Do you believe it is actually possible for a painter to earn a living off their work in our day and age, or do you believe the world has become far too digitalised to appreciate the humble craft of drawing and painting?
It’s complicated. There are two types of art markets; the Art Establishment (you’re top-of-the-pops today and a nowhere-man tomorrow) and the professional artist’s market (the artist who paints, draws and sculpts for the majority of people who buy art because they love it). The two markets have little in common. At the Angel Academy of Art, we train professionals. I tell my students that you can sell anything for €1,000,000, as long as you spend €900,000 promoting it. In the professional-artist world, a ‘finished’ still life will sell for between €4000 and €8000—the less the cost, the more sales will be made. Generally speaking, one will sell three such still lifes a year. In addition, one should paint a warm-up sketch every morning to study colour composition, including Mother Colour, or Field Colour, using still life, landscape or a portrait-character sketch to explore these abstract compositional ideas. Each of these studies takes about two hours (practice, practice, practice!), and the more successful ones (say three a week) can be sold for around €350 on a regular basis, once you find an outlet. This is one of the things we teach in our Art Business classes.
Do the arithmetic: 4000 x 3 = 12,000, and 350 x 3 x 50 = 52,500. This adds up to nearly 65,000€ a year. The dealer takes 50%, leaving the artist with €35,000. The government takes 30% of this for income tax, leaving the artist to pocket a clear €23,000 or €25,000. It’s not a fortune, but it is a living (this is net—money in your pocket—remember, not gross). Over time, one can increase one’s prices. Nowadays, too, one can sell online and eliminate the dealer (but add to one’s workload). Professional painting is labour-intensive; it isn’t for lazy people. The more you paint, the more money you’ll make. If one could paint excellent portraits of people’s children for €20 each (for example), one would have more work than one could do in a lifetime. Selling is partly just a matter of finding a viable price for the market (obviously one has to charge more than €20 for a portrait!). None of this applies to abstract painting; people want realistic paintings. The business end of things is much more complicated than this, but that sketches it out.
Over the years, there have been several studio-schools that have been established in Florence which stem from the teachings of the state academy of art in St. Petersburg, Russia. What is your opinion of these schools and the Russian construction-based approach to training painters?
The 19th century Russian academies (St. Petersburg & Moscow) were truly great, but the modern versions are less so. To my mind, realism is a combination of conceptualism (the understanding of morphology; i.e., form and construction) and empirical observation. The modern Russians don’t give enough attention to the empirical side of things, I feel; however, I much prefer their attitude as opposed to the mindless Sight-Size approach so prevalent in today’s ateliers and academies. I am in process of revamping our programme and making it more like the 19th century type of instruction, rather than the 20th century type. In a word, design dominates. Rhythm, flow-through lines, unit repetition, proportion, colour harmony, anomaly and counterpoint. Bargue’s figure drawings, for example, show us how to design the human figure and create rhythmic outlines—S-curves, C-curves, straight lines; long lines, middle length lines and short lines. We need to get the word out about our soon-to-be unique programme.
One of the several reasons that Daniel Graves and I split was because I kept insisting that we were an art school and that we should therefore teach some art, which I explained earlier in the interview. The students, though, just wanted to learn how to copy stuff from nature.
I understand you have a particular love for painting subjects based on myth and allegory. What draws you to these particular subjects and do you find there are painters today who are creating commendable works based on these ideas?
There are many brilliant Realists today. Among these are (in no particular order) Colleen Barry, Roberto Ferri, Cesar Santos, Shane Wolf, the late Richard Schmid, Casey Baugh, Donato Giancola, the late Nelson Shanks, Arantzazu Martinez and Jennifer Gennari. Many of these artists paint allegories, continuing beyond the directions of the Old People, who painted allegories and fantasies based on the Bible’s stories and classical myths. It’s hard to define where one’s inspiration comes from—some painters are inspired by animals, some by scenes in interiors. I, and some like me, are inspired by a more visionary, allegorical approach.
I will add that I like to leave paintings in different stages of completion: they animate the painting and make it more entertaining. They also suggest that the sitter’s life is incomplete and not yet over. This is often evident in my portraits, as is my custom, the clothing and the background are more roughly painted than the face.
As you find yourself getting older, have you noticed that your subject matter is changing with your coming of age, or are you still trying to achieve things in your work which you were pursuing in your younger days?
I am trying to get back to what originally motivated me to paint; fantasies and allegories. The thing is, though, that they take a lot of time and focus, and teaching—which earns me my living these days—allows me very little time. I have several paintings on the easel, but progress is slow.
Annigoni at Work (work in progress). Oil on canvas, 24” x 21”. Collection of Michael John Angel, Florence, ITA. Image courtesy of: Michael John Angel.
Do you find that drawing and painting in a technical sense have become easier for you at this point in your life, or are there aspects of the craft which you still struggle with?
As for the technical side, I can certainly paint better and easier than when I was younger, but there are many aspects that I still need to learn. One of the greatest and most famous cello players of the 20th century, Pablo Casals, was asked why, at 91 years of age, he still practised scales every day. He replied, “I’m starting to hear an improvement.”
I understand there are a number of books you have been working on throughout your life which speak to the technicalities of drawing, painting and design. How far off are these books from being published?
There are three books that I am currently working on; The Principles of Pictorial Composition, Painting the Figure and Historical Painting Methods. Of the three, the book on composition is by far the nearest to completion. I hope to have it finished in 2025.
It must be very satisfying at this point in your life to look at the Angel Academy of Art and know that you created it and that it has and will continue to be a fine school of realism which has trained many sought-after painters, who have carried the tradition of realist painting into the twenty-first century. Do you ever ponder the idea of how the Angel Academy of Art will be carried on when you are gone?
Yes, I’m extremely proud of what we’ve done. Will painting survive this Brave New World, though? It’s probably too expensive for most people, and there are a plethora of alternatives. However, a good painting only costs about the price of a good sofa and is well within many people’s budget. There’s nothing like having beautiful original paintings on the wall to enliven your living space!
As for the Angel Academy of Art, I’m certain it will continue well into the future. The time for Realism has come round again, and the Angel Academy will continue as the best place to learn how to be an artist.
We feel tremendously privileged to have had this opportunity to interview Mr. Angel and we thank him for his generosity and patience in answering our questions. Through his devotion to traditional figurative painting and his diligence in training a multitude of painters who have passed through the Angel Academy of Art, he has made it possible for a whole new generation of artists to achieve what those in centuries past did. Mr. Angel remains as one of the key artist-teachers who has carried the mantle of the realist tradition into the 21st century, and continues to be one of its main espousers. For that, we are most grateful and we look forward to following his life’s work for years to come.
Mr. Angel school’s website:
www.angelacademyofart.com
Mr. Angel school’s website:
www.angelacademyofart.com