Charles Cecil
Charles Cecil was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1945 and raised in Winnetka Illinois. He attended Haverford College in Pennsylvania and graduated with degrees in art history and the classics. Cecil was given an N.D.E.A. grant to continue his studies of art history at Yale. After graduate school, Cecil received the coveted Greenshields Foundation grant and studied with R.H. Ives Gammell in Boston and Richard F. Lack in Minneapolis. Cecil received a fellowship from the Stacey Foundation allowing him to paint landscapes in Europe. He moved to Florence and traveled to Italian hill towns in the summers to paint. In Florence, Cecil, along with fellow realist Daniel Graves, founded Studio Cecil-Graves, for the education of young painters in classical drawing and oil painting. In 1991, Cecil opened his own school, Charles H. Cecil Studios.
"From master to pupil this language will live and evolve to fashion new images - not fleeting like film, but silent and slow to eternalize that which must pass in the great arc of time."
- Charles Cecil
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Charles H. Cecil Studios is based upon the principles of the nineteenth-century Parisian atelier method, as well as a call for something of a modern renaissance. Gammell was the first to extend this knowledge of the atelier method to Cecil, and Gammell's own teacher was William Paxton, who studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. These methods of training can be traced back to the old Masters, and ultimately to Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and works of art. In the atelier method, students are taught to draw and paint from nature, using the "sight-size" technique. Cecil's hope is that the young painter will understand the model as a whole. In addition to teaching drawing and painting from plaster casts, the figure and portraiture, the school offers weekly lectures that are of benefit to the Florentine art community. Notably, Cecil's studio is situated in the oldest Florentine atelier still in use, The Church of San Raffaello. The church was first changed over into a studio by noted sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini, pupil of Jacques-Louis David.
Cecil himself has consistently been recognized by the international art community. He has received numerous awards from the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1979, Cecil won the Hallgarten First Prize for oil painting and in 1980 he won the Altman Second Prize for landscape painting. Cecil's works can be found in gallery and private collections throughout Europe and America.
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Realists
