Dean Graham Nickson

The Studio School is a place where Drawing, Painting, Sculpture and Art History are studied in depth. There are no commercial applications of art, no fragmentary liberal arts as part of degree requirements, and no distractions other than these four major preoccupations.

The moment one walks through the main entrance, it feels like a real school of art, an atelier; quite different from the frequently bleak institutions of higher education. The building alone encompasses a veritable archaeologist's experience of great art within its walls, first as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's salon and studio, then as the Whitney Museum of American Art, and finally, for the last 30 years, the New York Studio School.

Names associated with its walls give us a rich heritage - Ryder, Benton, de Kooning, Gorky, Guston and many others.

It is not like any other school. It is unlike the school proffering the expectation of commercial success and job placement. It is unlike the school open to everyone, dilettante and student alike. It is unlike the school with a high-tech base, a design approach or one purely conceptual. It is not a school harking back to the halcyon days of the very distant past, aspiring to be an “academy.”

It is, however, a school based on total commitment to the pursuit of excellence and research in drawing, painting and sculpture. It is a school run by professional artists, not career academics. This attribute gives the student access to the most distinguished in their fields. The painters, sculptors and art historians who teach in the School reflect a variety and diversity of attitudes, held together by a common bond: that of quality, integrity, and intensity of research. This nourishes our cherished belief in the search for an original and personal vision, that vision, pushed to an extreme, which all great artists have pursued and discovered over the course of their lives.

It is a school where drawing is considered the framework of form. “Drawing is the probity of Art,” as the painter Ingres said. We believe it.

We have a school that is not about easy success. In a world of increasing skepticism and consumer orientation, it is a refreshing wind in the doldrums of disbelief in the quality of art.

It is a school based on the maxim: “Ambition for the work, not ambition for the career.” We strongly believe our students will be the painters and sculptors of the future, still working in 30 years, through the vicissitudes of success and failure in the eyes of the world. We believe in the strength of great and original education. We believe in the power of art to change one's life.

Graham Nickson