tinc•ture (tingk ’ch∂r) n. [ME < Lat. Tinctura, a dyeing < tingere, to dye.] 1. A dyeing substance: pigment. 2. An imparted color: tint. 3. A quality that colors, pervades, or distinguishes. 4. A vestige or trace. 5. A component of a substance extracted by means of a solvent. 6. An alcohol solution of a nonvolatile medicine <tincture of iodine> 7. A heraldic metal, color or fur. —vt. -tured, -turing, -tures. 1. To tinge with a color: tint. 2. To infuse, as with a quality: impregnate.
In a round-about way, it was one of the great artists of the early Italian Renaissance, Piero della Francesca (d. 1492), who first beckoned Ronald Christ, Wichita State professor of painting and drawing, to the International School of Art in Umbria, Italy, which is campused in two neighboring hill towns overlooking the Tiber River valley, just about halfway between Rome and Florence.
In the summer of 1989, lured by Piero’s art and spurred by a research grant to study the 15th-century painter’s work, Christ (whose name rhymes with wrist) traveled to Italy with his wife, Barbara Mason, who is WSU’s academic coordinator for computer sciences.
They visited many sites, including the Tuscan town of Piero’s birth, Sansepolcro.
“Piero is admired for the way in which he renders up forms — in a kind of classical, still realism,” says Christ, whose own artistic endeavors have made the journey from still-life imagery with a strong geometric component, to landscape and then into figurative forms. “When my work was being moved toward the figure, the slightly surreal, dream-like, frozen quality of Piero was something I wanted to experience first hand — to study and then to apply to my own work.”
At first glance, Christ’s strikingly modern paintings may seem to bear little relationship to the 500-year-old works of Piero and other Renaissance masters, but at second look the artworks are infused with similarities. For one thing, Christ’s work mirrors his fascination with Italian and Flemish multiple panel and narrative cycle painting; many of his subjects are painted on multiple canvases, or polyptychs.
And as Mira Merriman, art historian and WSU art professor emeritus, explained in the program notes for the 1994 exhibition, Contempories XV: Ronald Christ, Selected Works 1976-1993: “[T]here is a kind of painting with constructed deep space that benefits from our experience of the modern photographic capability to isolate small details of distant forms. The Italian Renaissance specialized in such paintings, having invented perspective, and it is possibly owing to this fact that the works of a painter like Piero della Francesca have found favor in the 20th century. … Ron Christ’s paintings have this virtue to an extremely high degree.”
While continuing his artistic investigations into Renaissance art, polyptychs and Piero, Christ, who has taught for more than 25 years, at Indiana University and since 1976 at WSU, kept another objective close at hand. “I love teaching almost as much as making art,” he says. “One of the things I wanted to do was visit a number of schools to see what kind of opportunities would be out there for our students to do foreign study.”
His attention fell on the International School of Art, set in the medieval Umbrian village of Montecastello di Vibio, near the town of Todi. Founded in 1988 by the painter and educator Nicolas Carone and Helaine Treitman, an artist, dancer and administrator, ISA was begun as a school of modern art with in-depth training in drawing, painting and sculpture.
“When I called ISA,” Christ says, “I explained I wanted to find a connection that might work out.” He set up a visit and was pleased to learn that William Bailey, a painter whose work is represented in the collections of a number of museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, was critiquing at the school that day. Christ became taken with ISA’s founders and directors, faculty and visiting artists and with its various educational offerings.
Today, in addition to the school’s core programs, which comprise a 13-week summer semester and two separate six-week sessions that provide intensive daily studio work with instruction and critiques by internationally renowned artists, ISA also offers one-week seminars, a residence program that enables artists to work independently for a month or more without the influence of instructors, and — its newest offering — continuing education programs based in Todi and designed for adults with some background in art who want to pursue their interest to a deeper level.
Yet what finally sold Christ on the school was its underlying match with WSU’s School of Art and Design. “Our program emphasizes figure drawing and direct observational drawing,” he explains. “So, drawing serves an important place in our curriculum. It is a foundational underpinning for the whole art program here, as it is at ISA.”
After a span of years during which Christ watched closely the growth of ISA, the first WSU student, Mika Holtzinger ’98, whose painting “View From My Studio” graced the fall 1999 issue of The Shocker, made the trip to Umbria in 1996. It was her first time overseas.
“What ISA gave me,” she says, “was confidence. It made me look at myself as an artist, and I came away with a deeper appreciation for beauty. I’m from Wichita, and I’d always seen the beauty here, but it wasn’t until I left and came back that I appreciated that beauty — the yellows and oranges, the grays and blues of Kansas. In Umbria there are so many greens. I’d never used green on my palette before.”
Through an ISA contact, she is now in graduate school at the University of Oregon in Eugene. “Mika has given us an example of how to use the networking that ISA can provide,” Christ says. “If you’re thinking about making connections and working within a quality network, our relationship with ISA has already paid off. One of the things I like to emphasize about ISA is its very rigorous program, its very high standards and high quality of instruction and students.”
Since Holtzinger, other students and alumni have benefited from WSU’s Italian connection. Christ, who this summer is teaching figure drawing at one of ISA’s continuing education programs in Todi, is excited about the diverse opportunities ISA study provides artists — and he’s not simply referring to artistic opportunities, but personal and cultural ones, too. The school, after all, is located in a region of Italy tinged with 2,000 years of history and culture from four distinct eras: Etruscan, Roman, Medieval and Renaissance.
“I was there in the fall of 1998,” recalls Mary Morgan ’96, who will be returning to WSU as a visiting assistant professor this fall. Because her art focuses on light and optics, among her dominant memories of Italy are the ever-shifting play of light across the land and the ever-changing hues of illuminated objects.
“Certainly the terrain and the optical shifting of light were key for me,” she says. “Prominent in my memory are the colors of the pigments in the Roman frescoes at Pompei. After the volcanic eruption, the lava preserved the intense reds, sap greens and Prussian blues that they used. The entire experience was very broadening. It’s important, I think, to be exposed to different cultures. We all need to venture out of our local environments at times.”
Barbara Mallonee ’77 ventured to Italy in spring 1999. Etruscan and Roman ruins were among the sites that captured her eye — and imagination. “I had had no experience at all with the Etruscan civilization,” she relates. While ISA offers day trips to many locales, one of her favorite days was striking out on a field trip of her own. “I rented a car and drove to the Mediterranean,” she says, “to Port Hercules and painted. I love to be on location to paint. For me, ISA cemented the point, there is no limitation to being creative.”
Shirley Glickman ’83 experienced an artistic turning point while at ISA in May 1999. “I’ve spent years looking at art, art, art,” she explains. “This time I looked to myself. I feel like I became truly independent in my work that spring, and I’m pleased with the development.” She was also pleased with the local color and local people, who enriched her stay. “The Italian people are so warm, with such wonderful personalities. They took a genuine interest in us. One thing I noticed was their voices. Sometimes, I would just like to listen to their beautiful, musical voices — even though I barely understood a word of Italian.”
The language difference turned out to be less of a barrier than a friendly game of charades. “One of the things I wanted to locate after I arrived,” Glickman says, “was a beauty shop. No one in the village knew English, and I didn’t know Italian. But I carried a little pocket dictionary, and between that and a lot of gesturing, we managed very well.”
Christopher Bertholf ’99 is attending ISA for the second time. Enthralled by Umbria, he plans to set up home there after his current ISA session is complete later this summer.
“It’s an intense learning experience,” he says over the phone from Montecastello. “I’m learning things I may not know I’ve learned for 20 years. The faculty are world-class, like Nick Carone, and so many others. And the environment is amazing. We’re in a medieval village, and there are parts of its walls that are Roman. There are rolling hills, olive groves, vineyards, fields of poppies. The colors here, you think of golden ocher, salmon, Thelo blue and a million shades of green. The light yellows and blues of Kansas, you can see them here, too. There are times when you see Umbria in Kansas and Kansas in Umbria — and everywhere else. There are always glimpses of home.”
Each WSU/ISA student, in very unique ways, has come to a deep lesson, one the poet Wallace Stevens reflects on in these words:
The image must be of the nature of its creator.
It is the nature of its creator increased,
Heightened. It is he, anew, in a freshened youth
And it is he in the substance of his region
Wood of his forests and stone out of his fields
Or from under his mountains.
And fed by the tincture of place.
