Learn art in downtown Manchester
For anyone who’s wanted to draw or paint but didn’t know where to begin, or lapsed artists looking for a new start, Art House Studios School for Drawing and Painting, located in a well-lit second-floor space next to the Palace Theatre on Hanover Street in Manchester, will fill the bill.
Run by an artist, Plymouth State professor and Currier Museum teacher, it offers classes in drawing, painting, abstraction, portraiture, and mixed-media assemblage, along with open studio sessions and figure drawing. Prices start at $35 for a workshop, materials included.
Jason Bagatta grew up a half hour away from New York City, later attending the Fashion Institute of Technology there. “But I didn’t study fashion,” he said while sitting at a table in the spacious studio, surrounded by easels, paint and other art supplies, along with a chop saw in a corner of the room.
Bagatta came to Manchester when an academic job called, and he’s been here ever since. He started Art House when the nearby college where he taught was bought by another institution. “That particular administration wasn’t doing it justice,” he said. Seeing a gap, he decided to fill it.
Bagatta’s teaching philosophy is built on three words. “A way in,” he said. “This is how we can start, then it’s up to you how you interpret it. I’m not looking for a cookie-cutter, copy-me. I show you a technique and you interpret it for yourself, and that allows people to bring their own personality.”
While in graduate school, Bagatta read Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why by social anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake, and found the idea that changed how he thinks about his work. “Art-making is biological, and it’s a response to existing,” he recalled. “It is the act of making things special.”
The insight cut through the over-intellectualizing that he saw surrounding art education and replaced it with a simpler and more inclusive point of view. Dissanayake’s definition, he believes, opens up art’s possibilities. “Anything can be artfully done,” he said, tracing a line back to monastic culture. “A certain amount of integrity can be put into sweeping a floor.”
This philosophy also shaped how he thought about his students. A creative background, he realized, can range “from how you decorate your living space, to how you make a bed or a sandwich, how you garden … and then to more traditional drawing and painting and sculpture and poetry.”
Those attending classes span an equally wide range of ages and experience.
“I get the child prodigy, the 12-year-old who is way over-accomplishing and needs a creative outlet aside from academics,” Bagatta said. “But mostly it’s adult learners, people in their 30s, married people, a lot of people who have retired. The range is 14 to people in their 90s.”
What motivates them isn’t commercial aims, although artists looking to sell their works are referred to the nearby Mosaic Art Collective — who soon won’t be a next-door neighbor. On June 13, Mosaic will move from its second-floor space to a street level storefront at 410 Chestnut St., joined by longtime co-tenant See Saw Art.
Frequently, students are driven by a need to anchor a newfound urge to create, whether to fill in something that’s missing or return to an abandoned muse. Having a deadline, it turns out, matters. “For people who like to make stuff but won’t do it unless they come to a structured situation,” Bagatta said. “They need a time and a place designated for that.”
Among Bagatta’s favorite experiences at Art House is working with a New Americans ESL group, where the language barrier turned out not to matter. “It’s a visual interaction,” he said. “I can show them what I want them to do as well as explain it, and they can do it because they could see me doing it. The visual language transcends the verbal.”
In mid-June, Art House Studios will host a three-day art intensive for students ages 13 to 17. It’s a minicamp, with three four-hour sessions on consecutive days, 12 hours in all. Both drawing and painting will be covered in a collaborative framework, guided by an interactive discussion on day one. “I want to see what these kids want,” Bagatta said.
His academic approach, Bagatta continued, never loses sight of what he calls “serious play.” That the classroom can feed and inspire him as much as it does his students is something he’s sheepishly pleased to admit.
“Someone’s always doing something I wouldn’t have thought of,” he said with the hint of a guilty smile. “I’m open to receive as much as possible.”
Art House Studios School for Drawing and Painting
Where: 66 Hanover St., Suite 202, Manchester
More: arthousestudios.org
Featured photo: Jason Bagatta. Photo by Michael Witthaus