The Way Forward Is the Way Back

“T viewer should see the object as I saw it, but with a lot of room for his own interpretation....The painting is like a very clear mirror which is barely visible but unmistakably there,” reflects Spanish painter Antonio López García (b. 1936) (1). “I am nostalgic for an art of our times in which a greater number of people can participate” (1). Part of a contemporary movement rooted in the traditions of 17th-century Spanish realism, López García, Claudio Bravo, Bernando Torrens, Francisco Roa, and many others have drawn inspiration from the meticulous work of Francisco de Zurbarán, Jusepe de Ribera, and Diego Velásquez to create their own naturalist style (2). Rejecting abstraction, these artists create paintings from a broad range of subjects, choosing, much like their predecessors, a few or even one subject, which they lavish with extreme seriousness and attention, focusing on the “credible detail, that small touch of the familiar,” that has long been part of the repertory of Spanish painters (3). The characteristic high technical quality is not an end in itself, and the work reaches far beyond mere representation of nature. In the United States, revival of traditional painting skills in the latter part of the 20th century is credited to professor Richard Lack, who in his essay On the Training of Painters (1969) envisioned atelier training in the contemporary art scene, “Indeed if Western Civilization wishes to retain the art of painting as a living part of its culture, this may be our last hope.” He founded the pioneering Atelier Lack in Minneapolis, “a small island of traditional art training surrounded by a sea of hostile opinion” (4). Rigorous technique, which had fallen by the wayside in modern times, addressed quality of drawing, color plausibility, truthfulness of light and shadow, highly developed skills of execution, and overall faithful depiction of nature. The atelier attracted students from all over the world and became the model for similar schools, among them The New York Academy of Art and the Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy. The New York Academy of Art won the support of Andy Warhol: “The course of art history,” he said, “would be changed if one thousand students could be taught Old Master drawing and painting techniques” (5). In 1982, Lack coined the term “Classical Realism” because as he put it, “Any 20th century painting that suggests a recognizable object, however crudely or childishly rendered, qualifies as ‘realistic.’ Obviously, the simple word ‘realism,’ when applied to painting...is no longer meaningful” (6). But contemporary American realists are a disparate group, loosely characterized by a realistic approach to representation, which has persisted widely in the post-abstraction era. A painter in the tradition of Spanish realism, Francisco Roa was born in Guadalajara, Spain, and moved to Madrid at age 18 to study at the