I have been fortunate in having many outstanding teachers over my art career beginning with the Goetz, then Mr. Siegfried Hahn and Howard Wexler, my teachers at Ringling School of Art, my friend Jean Lefevre, as well my teachers in Medical Illustration Graduate School and in my first medical illustration job my mentor was Barry Baker who trained with Jacques Maroger.
The foundation of figurative art is based on academic training. When I was 8 years old I studied with my first teachers Mr and Mrs Goetz who taught me how to paint with pastels. At the age of 10 I began my studies with Mr Howard Wexler and Siegfried Hahn who taught me how to paint using the painting techniques and mediums of the old masters rediscovered by Jacques Maroger, the head of the Louvre Museum Laboratories - see below.
I continued my education for 7 years with Mr Hahn and Wexler in France, Germany and New Mexico where they eventually settled. My portrait of Marcia Beauregard was accepted into the New Mexico Art fair in the adult category. In my senior year of high school I won a Hallmark cards Scholarship to study art at Ringling School of Art (a very academic school in Florida). Based on my first year of work the art teaching faculty awarded me a scholarship.
Instead of continuing, I embarked on 4 year study period in Paris France at two prestigious schools of art; the Beaux Arts school and Arts Decoratifs. After May 1998, the Beaux Arts school was no longer teaching academic art but I was able to find one studio doing figurative art and I also studied etching.
During my first days in France, as I wandered the Louvre museum, I made the acquaintance of an Academic Painter, Jean Lefevre who invited me to visit his studio next to the Delacroix museum in the Latin Quarter. Mr Lefevre was in his 90s when I met him and still drawing and painting. He was a link to the past because he had known Degas, had seen the Eiffel tower being built and had traveled all over Europe and Africa painting. He taught me how to do luminous water colors, and I in turn brought my young art student friends to meet him and to listen to his stories
While in France I was an official copiest in the Louvre, copying old masters paintings. I also did drawings from statues and anatomical dissections. I traveled extensively throughout Western and Eastern Europe to visit Art museums. During my student years I supported myself with the sale of my artwork, having a one man show each summer. I was commissioned by a collector of racing cars to do drawings of his collection at the Mas du Clos, France. I was awarded a Harriet Hale Woole Grant to study and live in Paris in an artist's studio at the Cité Universitaire 1974-75.
On returning home I worked for a television station doing Electronic News Gathering; shooting video and editing news stories. I enrolled in premedical courses that qualified me to enter into a graduate school course in medical illustration; I obtained my Masters of Arts in 1981. Medical illustration is probably the most academic of all art careers, requiring drawing skills and memory.
In my first job as a medical illustrator, I was mentored by a talented medical illustrator, Barry Baker, who had studied with Jacques Maroger in Baltimore. Over my professional career as a medical artist I have had the privilege of working with many outstanding medical doctors, scientists and surgeons. In the past few years I have studied psychiatry and then I was asked to co teach an introduction to pyschiatry for the layman at the Douglas Hospital with Drs. Gert Morgenstern and Charles Cahn.
More on Jacques Maroger:
From introduction by Paul A. Chew, Ph.D. to Joseph Shepard book on Portraiture
Jacques Maroger (b 1885 d 1962). Maroger was formally the Technical Director of the Laboratory of the Louvre in Paris and President of the Restorers of Art in France.
It is of interest to note that Maroger's teacher was the French artist Louis Anquetin (1961-1932), who during his lifetime was referred to as the Michelangelo of France, recognizing his gift as a superb draftsman. Anquetin was a close friend of Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec ,and they painted portraits of each other. Vincent Van Gogh was also a mutual friend of Anquetin and together they founded a style of painting called "Cloisonism" and Anquetin's painting "Avenue de Clichy, Five O'clock", 1887, directly influenced Van Gogh's oil "Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles", 1888. Anquetin quit the group of French Impressionists, saying that none of them knew how to draw. He then went back to the museums to study the works of the old masters, Rubens, Hals and Rembrandt, earnestly trying to rediscover their lost secret painting techniques. The remaining years absorbed his time and he was virtually forgotten.
Maroger studied and worked with Anquetin and continued his teacher's research into the old masters' mediums and techniques. While at the Louvre, Maroger was credited with the discovery of the first oil painting medium of the 15th century artist Jan Van Eyck, receiving the "Legion of Honor" for his research. On the eve of World War II, Maroger moved to New York City where he met Mrs. Robert Garrett, a patron of the arts and an amateur painter. Mrs. Garrett's family built and owned the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and was instrumental in building the first railroad in Russia. Mrs. Garrett persuaded Maroger to go to Baltimore and give her private lessons.
The French artist Raoul Dufy (1887-1953) and the Austrian George Groz (1893-1959) were known to Maroger and also came to the United States in the 1930's and met Maroger at Mrs. Garrett's home. Before leaving Europe Maroger became the technical advisor for Raoul Dufy while he was painting the large mural "Electricity" for the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. He used the Maroger medium for the painting.
Maroger was asked to teach at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore. Joseph Sheppard became Maroger's student for his four years of study at the Institute and continued his artistic relationship until Maroger's death. While teaching at the Institute Maroger formed a group of artists that used his medium for paintings based on the principles of 17th century painters. Those artists exhibited together at the Grand Central Galleries in New York City. The group included Maroger, Reginald Marsh (1898-1954), Joseph Sheppard and other students from the Institute.
Graphite drawing copy of statue by Barye
Copy of Ingres painting, done from original in Louvre
The Academic Training of Patrick McDonnell
Medical illustration in the National Track and Field Museum
New York City, by Patrick McDonnell