Daniel Graves
Daniel Graves was born in 1949 in Rochester, New York. He graduated from the Maryland Art Institute in 1972 where he studied with Joseph Shepard and Frank Russell. Graves continued his studies with Richard Serrin at the Villa Schifanoia Graduate School of Fine Art in Florence, Italy. Following a course of training with Richard Lack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he taught at the Atelier Lack Studio of Fine Art. In the late 1970s, Graves returned to Florence and undertook individual study with Nerina Simi who maintained a classical nineteenth-century studio. Ms. Simi was the daughter of the Florentine painter Filadelfo Simi who had studied with Jean-Leon Gerome, the head of the French Academy in Paris in the 1870s. With such a rich background of training, Graves has created a style of oil painting that blends the Florentine tradition of Simi and the master classical realist Piero Annigoni with the draftsmanship of the French artist Charles Bargue’s Cours des Dessins and Academie Julien.
Daniel Graves joined Charles Cecil to found Studio Cecil-Graves in Florence, which trained many practitioners of classical realism for nearly a decade. Graves then established the Florence Academy of Art in 1991. The school has been in the forefront of classical realist art education for nearly twenty years. The Academy recently opened a second school in Molndal, Gothenburg, Sweden. In “Tradition in the 21st Century,” an essay published in the exhibition catalogue Realism Revisited: The Florence Academy of Art (2003), Graves described his training in Old Masters techniques and heralded the classical realist renaissance for its aesthetics and art education. The exhibition “Realism Revisited” traveled in Europe and the United States. Practitioners, connoisseurs, and scholars of modern representational art recognize “Realism Revisited” and its accompanying catalogue as a defining moment in the appreciation of classical realist art. The Academy’s biannual alumni exhibition showcases the works of current students and instructors as well as recent graduates of both of the Florence and Molndal schools. In April 2008, Daniel Graves and the Florence Academy received the Excellence in Art Education Award from the Portrait Society of America.
When not teaching, Graves is an active painter of portraits and still lifes in his studio in Florence. He is currently working on a large, multi-figured narrative painting and pursues landscape painting during his extensive travels. His work is in both public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad.
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Realists
