...Ecce Club Caravaggio

... Ecce Club Caravaggio... Behold, Club Caravaggio... established last year in 2018 as a private, non-profit, informal course for work colleagues, this club was and continues to be the incubating genesis for Amphitheatrum Anatomicum. It all started quite harmlessly, when I was approached by a small group of work colleagues who had zero or limited experience with art, but with great zeal and enthusiasm for learning how to draw and to learn some "secrets" of the Old Masters. While some people call it "secrets" of the Old Masters, I have much fun with this term because these secrets are just visual tricks that can be learned quite rapidly, but requiring much repetition and practice. I realized a while ago, in part thanks to my friend and professional artist/master Anar Rasulov, that art must be approached with much specificity, rigor, and repetition, and that hard work in and of itself is talent and perhaps superior to it, since talent without application is truly a sad waste.

Specificity of motion and thinking is fundamental. For instance, if one wishes to be good at jumping rope, one must jump rope constantly. If one wishes to excel at ice skating, then ice skating must be undertaken obsessively, and the same is true with any type of applied learning and skill development. Thus, I realized that if one wishes to be good at artistic anatomy and oil painting, then one must practice this with singular focus, constantly, repeatedly, and fully immersed 1,000%.

I used to draw and paint quite a bit in my younger years, out of leisure and enjoyment, but then life and work got in the way. I stopped painting and drawing for quite a long time, and it wasn't until a few years ago that I decided to return to my passion. When I returned to painting, I discovered that my skill had suffered quite a bit during my inactivity, and that the more I sketched, painted, and doodled, the better faster my technique would improve. Furthermore, I realized that if I committed myself to teaching and helping other amateur artists along the way, I would force myself to attain higher technical experience as I tried to explain the fundamentals. This is when I decided to take a radical departure in teaching methodology.

While some art instruction is geared to spending much time with basics, drawing circles and squares, I decided to dispense with all of this in my approach and experiment with fully downloading as much information as I possibly could (in as short a time frame) to my new group of eager students. The concept was to fully immerse students from day one, and jump head-first into very advanced artistic themes, concepts, and rich historical background... hence Club Caravaggio.

​Why Caravaggio? Like many other artists and art lovers, I happen to suffer from Caravaggio disease, an incurable malady that is acquired by prolonged exposure to the works of Michelangelo Merisi Da Caravaggio. Falling under the spell of Caravaggio is very high-risk behavior, like sharing heroin needles. I have even taken to painting with lead white paints like he did, a very dangerous proposition where it not for the fact that we probably breathe more lead in our toxic air than whatever I'll be exposed to in my palette and brushes. To put it simply, Caravaggio is my master (whether he likes it or not), and it is through the legacy that he has left behind (through his many "oeuvres" and "tour-de-force") that I owe my on-going apprenticeship. He lived a very short, but intense, life. Hidden within the pigments and brush strokes are many lessons that have yet to be discovered. I consider myself only a journeyman, willing to share whatever I have learned through self-study, purist reconstructions of his paintings, and countless hours reading and obsessing about his works.  Aside from the better known Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti, both easy to digest for mass consumption, Caravaggio is more complex and perhaps one of the most influential artists ever (personal opinion).