School and the lack of it. (Part 3 of 4)

We all sat down together in an empty classroom and he explained to them that he wholeheartedly believed I shouldn’t come back for the second-year painting classes. He thought it would be a waste of my time because I was already painting at a much higher level than first year painting students and he was concerned that the instructors who would be teaching painting the following year might not be able to help me as much as I had hoped. This instructor’s name was Fiore Custode. “Where should our Billy boy go?” they inquired. “Italy!” Well, Fiore Custode was Italian, so, no surprise there. And with that, I enrolled in the Academy of Fine Art in Florence, Italy.

I attended classes there every day for a full two weeks before ever catching a glimpse of the “professor.” For two weeks, we were left completely on our own. We were drawing from a live model and, because of the training I had received at Ringling the year before, I soon attracted a crowd around my easel. Then, suddenly, and with a flourish, Professor Conte′ entered the room. He wore a cape. A velvet cape!!! It flowed behind him as he twirled his way through the classroom. He carried a heavy book under his arm with the front cover facing out. It read: CONTE′. He chatted with the Italian students in a corner of the room, while clinging to his book, as though for dear life, while ignoring the English-speaking students entirely. He looked at no one’s work. He seemed completely uninterested in anything other than himself, and after a few minutes, and with a final twirl of his cape, he left us to our own devices once again.

I located a bookstore later that afternoon and found a copy of the book he was so unabashedly displaying in class. I was filled with anticipation because, here in this historic city that gave us Michelangelo, here in the city of the most exquisite realist painters of the High Renaissance, such as da Vinci and Raphael, I was going to study with this modern-day Italian master. I opened the book. My heart sank as I beheld the flat Picasso-like cubist paintings on its pages. Judging by his work, I seriously doubted that he had much to teach me. Nevertheless, being a good boy, raised right, I kept attending the class every day. By the third week, the Italian students were bringing their drawings to me for pointers.

After the fourth week, Professor Conte′ graced us with his second appearance. It was a repeat performance. It lasted less than five minutes. As he left, I packed up my art supplies and left by the same door that he did, never to return until forty-seven years later when, as a tourist, I took my wife to see the crime scene.

Thirty years after my experience with the Academy in Florence, a woman who visited my gallery told me that she attended the Academy twenty years after I did and had the exact same experience. We marveled together at how it was possible that this travesty was somehow kept secret. Unsuspecting students from all over the world flock to Florence to attend this school, never thinking for a moment that it was an Academy in name only. There were students that toughed it out for the entire length of the program. Why? Perhaps because they simply accepted that this must be the way it’s supposed to work. Wasn’t this the Academy?  Wasn’t this Italy? No instruction? Well, gee, I don’t know…

Fortunately, I have since heard that this abomination has changed and that the Academy of Fine Art in Florence has finally become a serious Atelier. Let’s hope so.

I went to the best art school in America and was told not to come back. I enrolled in the Academy of Fine Art in Florence, only to be disillusioned and left to my own devices. Oh, I studied like crazy for the year that I remained living there. I haunted the galleries in the Uffizi Museum. I drew statues in the beautiful churches, I got together with other artists, but for all of it I never received the painting instruction I had so craved. Despite my best efforts, I am a self-taught oil painter.

Upon my return to the states, I had my first one-man show at age nineteen at the Vasili Gallery in Coral Gables…ten years after picking up my first paint brush. The show featured the work I had brought back from Florence, plus a few drawings I had done in West Africa, where I spent a month before returning to the states. The art critic for the Miami News, Nellie Bower, asked me for one of my African drawings to reproduce in the review she was doing for my show. The headline of her article read, “Shades of Wyeth in young Miamian’s work.” She never returned the drawing, and because I was too intimidated to ask for it, I never saw it again.