![\"Kamille](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/skeleton.jpg\" "\\"Kamille")
<\/a>Kamille Corry Studio Space<\/p><\/div>\n
When it comes to the European tradition of the old masters, classical realism is rarely seen and almost lost in the State of Utah.\u00a0 With these techniques and methods of training and artistic expression so rare, I am grateful to have found Kamille Corry.\u00a0 After studying classical painting techniques for years in Europe and the States, Corry is now offering the same opportunity to serious artists in Utah, with the opening of her new atelier in Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n
As I enter Corry Studios there is a pigment-grinding table with glass bottles of colored powder and earth ready for mixing. Next to the table is a bookshelf packed with retrospectives of the old masters: Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Rodin, to name a few.\u00a0 Just beyond are numerous wooden easels ready and waiting for figure studies.\u00a0 There are plaster casts of classical sculptures, torsos, heads and hands. Student drawings of the sculptures are framed on the wall.\u00a0 The draperies are open to natural, western sunlight.\u00a0 Kamille Corry sits on a model riser and prepares a mahogany panel with linseed oil. Jazz is playing. The true romance of creation comes alive here, inspired by generations past and taught from one generation to the next.\u00a0 The tradition of the old masters, the techniques of mastery, the dedication of passion, and the foundation of art is alive in Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Kamille Corry Studio Space<\/p><\/div>\n
Corry ended up quitting the University\u2019s program and then spending time doing a lot of abstract, modernist expressionist pieces and experimenting with different mediums.\u00a0 She says,\u00a0 \u201c It was fun, but I never felt creative.\u00a0\u00a0 Oddly enough, because I grew up believing that abstract, expressionistic work was always more creative than anything realistic or representational.\u201d\u00a0 She took some classes at the Salt Lake Art Center in etching and lithography where she realized the importance of skills acquired in her career as a painter.\u00a0 She realized the importance of learning a craft and learning skills necessary to express a vision.Since early childhood, Kamille Corry knew she was going to be a painter.\u00a0 Growing up in Ogden, she always sensed something missing in Utah with respect to art.\u00a0 After going to Europe right out of high school, she became fascinated by the history of art there.\u00a0 She was surrounded by it.\u00a0 Returning to Utah to begin a four- year scholarship at the U\u2019s art department, she became disenchanted by the program.\u00a0 She remembers thinking that when she was enrolled in local community art classes at a frame shop in Ogden\u00a0 she learned more useful skills there than at the University.\u00a0 She says, \u201cMy teacher taught me perspective drawing, and he\u2019d put something in front of me to draw from nature, render it, a three dimensional object and all of its perspective.\u00a0 I loved it and I could just sit there and draw forever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kamille moved to Italy a few years later, searching for artistic training. She avoided the \u201cstudy abroad\u201d programs, where Italian art schools are filled with American students, because she wanted to immerse herself in Italian culture.\u00a0 By chance, she discovered Studio Cecil Graves, a small atelier, founded by American painters Charles Cecil and Daniel Graves.\u00a0 She was hesitant to enroll in the studio because the classes are taught in English.\u00a0 Then she met another painter, a friend of the professors at the atelier.\u00a0 \u201cHe would critique the drawings that I was doing, and he was a very harsh and thorough critic on my work.\u00a0 He strongly urged me to go to this atelier and study with Cecil and Graves because they were keeping the tradition alive of how the masters for hundreds of years learned techniques to draw and then to paint.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carnelian by Kamille Corry<\/p><\/div>\n Kamille Corry continued her training in Europe for about three years, at which time she came back to North Carolina to study with Jeffrey Mims, a classical realist painter she met at the atelier.\u00a0 The \u201catelier\u201d experience became crucial to her training.\u00a0 The \u201catelier\u201d or academy for traditional and classical methods of drawing and painting arose in the 19th century in France.\u00a0 At the time in Paris, students and teachers begin to rebel outside of the big art institutions and open up their own smaller studios, called ateliers, and develop a following.\u00a0 In the classic tradition, these studios would not even allow a student to touch a paintbrush for several years.\u00a0 The students of art drew from the vast collection of sculptures in Paris museums.\u00a0 A lot of the drawing training, like learning the notes on a piano, is universal.\u00a0 Every old master learns from a master before him and so on for hundreds of years.\u00a0 Until you copy an old master, the technique will not make sense.\u00a0 It\u2019s like someone trying to become a musician.\u00a0 It\u2019s possible to analyze a Beethoven but until you can play a Beethoven, it\u2019s impossible to really understand.\u00a0 \u201c It\u2019s a very valuable tool, to copy an old master.\u201d Corry says.<\/p>\n Kamille Corry returned to Europe to extend her artistic training when she received the Elizabeth Greenshieds Foundation Grant.\u00a0 She went to London to study sculptures in the museums.\u00a0 Though painting remains her main medium, the influence of sculpture can be seen in her work.\u00a0\u00a0 She says, \u201c I can still stand in front of a Michelangelo and get chills down my spine.\u00a0 Michelangelo\u2019s sculptures move me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>Kamille says, \u201cI rejected it [the training] at first because I thought it was too limiting or restrictive.\u00a0 Once I did it, it was exactly the opposite.\u00a0 I was really learning something.\u201d\u00a0 It was exhilarating for Kamille to learn skills and keep learning them, getting better and seeing progression.\u00a0 She begins drawing and painting from nature.\u00a0 She says, \u201cIt opened up a whole new world and once I started studying\u2026 that was it.\u00a0 I had no desire to ever go back and slap paint on fabric or throw it at a canvas and call it art.\u00a0 I wanted to express myself using the human figure or nature because that\u2019s what inspires me: a beautiful landscape, an expressive face or hands, the colors of rock in the Utah desert.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>