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[ 2 ] visiting artist n his red T-shirt and paint-spotted blue jeans, Sean Donovan sets out across the great trestle bridge. The summer sun beats down. The bridge, its steel girders painted several colors, is an elevated highway as well. It is the connector between the main campus and the Studio Center, the former factory building across the railroad tracks. Sean is one of about fifty painting seniors at mica. Like Jen Mussari (and other fine arts seniors), he’ll be walking back and forth on this bridge a lot today. This is a Monday, the first day of the school year, but every Monday will be a very ambulatory one for people like Sean. Each week, it is the day when many seniors gather at the Studio Building for crits. Then, at lunchtime , they boomerang back to the main campus. They head for Falvey Hall, the high-tech auditorium. On Mondays, Falvey is host to the Artist at Noon Lecture Series. At the lectures, the seniors gain exposure to a wide variety of career artists. They are artists outside the campus, and that means “visiting artists.” Every department has off-campus artists dropping by throughout the school year, but Artist at Noon—with its central location, budget, and ability to draw bigger names—has pride of place. Plus, seniors are required to go. The talk by the first visiting artist is a special event. She is the painter Lani Irwin, who will hold the female-artist-in-residence chair this year. She has arrived at mica with her painter husband, Alan Feltus, who will also teach. As a couple, they live and paint in Italy, and while modern, they extol what painters did in the Renaissance. Italy is a destination for many mica students as well, who participate in various art studies abroad, and the “Italian connection” is particularly strong. That summer, Sean had been painting in Italy, attending the International School of Art at Montecastello di Vibio, Umbria, a school where faculty at mica and other American art schools travel to teach now and again. The Italian summer has changed Sean’s life, he claims. The pressures of senior year are also surely at work. “After I came back from Italy, I knew I [ 32 ] f o u n d a t i o n s I wanted to be an artist the rest of my life,” says Sean, who is tall with cropped black hair, blue eyes, and a toothy smile. Sean paints in a “figurative ” style, his version of human forms, interiors, and recognizable objects (as opposed to pure abstraction). So a painter and speaker such as Irwin interests him. After Italy, moreover, he wants to become productive like never before. “I have to start taking this pretty seriously,” he says. “Put in the time and energy.”1 At the front of Falvey Hall, Irwin is being introduced by painting chairman Barry Nemett. Nemett is a Yale-trained artist who often takes students to study painting in Italy during the summers. (He takes them to Montecastello di Vibio, near where he met Irwin and Feltus, while mica has two “official” summer programs in Florence and Sorrento, near Naples .) Nemett is a minor legend at mica, an impresario of art, an outgoing personality, and a family man. By way of introduction, he says Irwin is most of all a good friend, a traveler from Italy, member of a wife-husband painting team with “one foot in tradition, one foot in the contemporary world.”2 What Irwin offers today is widely known as the “artist’s talk.” Artists speak of their lives and works while images of their art project on a screen in the darkened room. The screen in Falvey is massive. Irwin and her husband paint human figures in interior environments. Indeed, she and her husband met at American University in Washington, D.C., which then had a “good, strong, figurative painting department,” says Irwin, a woman with short, white hair and a colorful dress to her ankles. Since moving to Italy in 1984, they managed to live and rear a family of two sons on the sale of paintings and artists’ grants, with a little teaching thrown in. In their oil paintings, Irwin and her husband both evoke a kind of Renaissance realism. They use clear, if muted colors and create modern-day moods, but in times and places that are hard to locate. Figures, male and female, lounge at tables. They hold letters...

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