“Conversations with Shannon” by Erin Anderson of Atelier Dualis, 16x20, Oil on Masonite
Anyone with a passion for art will be familiar with a fundamental concern affecting all aspiring fine art students: how do I follow my heart, dedicate myself to my craft, and yet somehow manage not to fulfill the stereotype of the starving artist, subsisting on paint fumes and the whispers of the Muses? For some, this question dissuades even the first steps toward an art career, and for many, it fuels fear and discouragement among their family and friends. Even established artists with vast, glorious portfolios often find themselves languishing in obscurity, making wonderful art that hardly anyone sees. With more than four million artists, including art students, operating in the U.S., it’s incredibly easy to get lost in the shuffle. Erin Anderson has stepped up to this quandary with the 2012 founding of Atelier Dualis, an independent fine art school designed to give its students the most useful education possible.
The name says it all, carefully attired in Latinate wording. Atelier, French for “workshop,” describes a classic European method of art instruction in which a small number of students receive intensive training from a professional artist, laboring diligently and with individualized direction to hone their skills to the level of mastery. With “Dualis,” Anderson evokes the dual focuses of her curriculum: fine art on one hand, and on the other, the business acumen to turn that creative skill into a tenable career. It’s a sort of unification of the whimsical right brain and practical left brain to form a powerful alliance.
...students are empowered to explore their own aesthetic and generate their own unique body of work ...
To gain a real command of fundamental techniques, students must go through repetitious exercises, cultivating an understanding of the most basic components of visual form and developing control of technique before they can embark on their first drawing. These exercises in both charcoal and oil paint break down, with morphological precision, the components of visual language: the sphere, the cone, the cylinder, and the cube, and how they interact with light and shadow. With this foundation, students are empowered to explore their own aesthetic and generate their own unique body of work, confident that they can fully control their medium.
Part of this process involves coaching students about how to isolate and nurture their artistic vision. Sometimes creativity seems to come from a subconscious part of one’s self, and it’s not unusual to lack the perspective to recognize tendencies or themes in the art we live and breathe. Free association exercises allow the Atelier Dualis student to sift through the trove of their psyche for patterns they may not have known were emerging in their art.
This facet of training not only provokes clarity of purpose, it introduces artists to the innocuous form of branding that will start them on the path to melding creativity with a shrewd business sense. Anderson is well aware of the artist’s marketing phobia, but points out that branding has long been an organic part of art culture: “The most successful artists throughout history have been the ones that branded themselves strongly, so you can look at a piece and say ‘I know who did that.’” From Renoir to Banksy, we can see this for ourselves. Branding in an art career is not so much deviously manufacturing a saleable image as learning how to discover and clearly communicate one’s own aesthetic purpose as it evolves throughout one’s career. A background in psychology has shown Anderson that there are simply more and less effective ways to package and deliver information so that the mind understands and internalizes it. Acknowledging this doesn’t necessary transform an artist into a money-grubbing sellout.
During the three years that an average Atelier Dualis program takes, students build a marketing strategy along with a portfolio. Researching their demographic and the strategies of other artists who do similar work, whether in specialty or style, is incredibly important, although artists may want to resist comparison. “Unless you can recognize who’s going to be interested in what you do, and then market to them,” Anderson says, “you might not see much of a result.” Students study finance and entrepreneurship as well, developing business skills that will allow them to embark bravely on the next step in their journey, whether it be approaching galleries or starting a small business of their own.
The location on West Broad Street ensures a fair amount of exposure for the atelier as well as students’ gallery offerings...
One of the most practical resources provided by the atelier is its gallery. Here, students are encouraged to put their marketing education to work by setting up and promoting their own openings and group shows, real hands-on experience that not only exposes them to the challenges and rewards of organizing a show, but gives them exposure in a town increasingly known for its support of the arts.
Originally from Ohio, Anderson had numerous reasons for basing her school in Bethlehem after following her boyfriend to his residency at St. Luke’s. While the residency took up a lot of his time, she discovered the area’s thriving art community, and that the Lehigh Valley boasts convenient proximity to both Philadelphia and New York City. Her students can easily network with galleries in either city while safely enjoying the area’s affordable cost of living. The location on West Broad Street ensures a fair amount of exposure for the atelier as well as students’ gallery offerings, thanks to Bethlehem’s frequent events and the usual foot traffic, but Anderson is vigilant against complacency: “Some people have the mentality that if you create it, they will come, and that’s not true of anything. Everyone has to market.”
Fittingly, the atelier isn’t the only aspect of Anderson’s work that accomplishes dual purposes. She balances teaching with her own art career, networking in Manhattan from the comfort of Bethlehem. Her extraordinary drawings and paintings, which visually realize the energy of emotion surrounding the human form, are the product of an already established career in fine art.
From the tender age of seven and at the behest of a mother seeking some me-time, Erin Anderson started taking art lessons in the realist style and developed a thirst for proficiency. In college at Miami University, her parents’ insistence on a Plan B had her double-majoring in studio art and psychology, which has been of enormous benefit and influence along the way. It didn’t take long, though, to realize that something was missing to prepare her for a viable career in the arts. Her art professors could give her only vague advice on how an undergraduate degree in art could generate a decent livelihood. “I decided to pick up a minor in entrepreneurship and that was the best thing I could have possibly done.” Anderson’s knowledge of finance and marketing, plus experience gleaned in a public relations internship for a New York record company, has proven invaluable.
Still, she sought further art education to really polish her talents, choosing an independent school in favor of an MFA program. Ani Art Academy Waichulis in Bear Creek, Pennsylvania, is another atelier, now involved in charitable enterprises in Third World countries like the Dominican Republic, building art schools to give students a quality craft to sell to high-end tourists at nearby resorts. Here Anderson went through the same rigorous technical training she offers in Bethlehem, pushing her talent toward its highest potential.
Combining art and business training seems to violate some romantic fantasy that artists can or should be occupied only with the purely creative...
Now she combines the atelier’s thorough approach to refining fundamental skills with the business training artists need to promote themselves and share their work with the world. When it comes to her own art, Anderson has found that painting for about four hours at a time, then switching to her atelier work or other business matters, gives her renewed energy to approach these very different tasks. “If I try to put in fourteen hours a day,” she says frankly, “I’m going to paint garbage. To be able to split that focus actually allows me to become more efficient at both.”
In today’s economy, a growing number of people are turning to self-employment to seek out the best opportunities to prosper. No matter what the field, an understanding of marketing is crucial. Combining art and business training seems to violate some romantic fantasy that artists can or should be occupied only with the purely creative, leading lives of semi-functional, charcoal-daubed eccentricity, but if the symmetry of alternating imagination with more mundane work leads to better artistic production and a higher chance of financial success, this image of the single-minded artist isn’t helping anyone. Sharing the advantages of a balanced focus with its students, Atelier Dualis is poised to propel the Valley’s artists into inspired and effective careers.
91 W. Broad St., Bethlehem | 484.626.1303 | atelierdualis.com
