Timothy STOTZ

Draughtsman, painter, teacher, and independent scholar — Timothy STOTZ is the founder and artistic director of Studio Escalier, a small private art school and art colony in France. He tutors students from all over the world in contemporary classical figure drawing and painting, and lectures at the Musée du Louvre on 17th- to 19th-century French art, as well as on the history of academic art education.

Mr. Stotz’s short 2017 film on 18th-century pastel painting — La Technique du Pastel — was made at the invitation of the Musée du Louvre and produced by the museum. It features the creation of a portrait of his wife, the painter Nicole Michelle TULLY. The film is in the permanent collection of the Louvre, and for eight years (2017-2025) it was exhibited in the main graphic arts gallery of the Sully wing rotunda of the museum.

Mr. Stotz has exhibited his work in New York City, San Francisco, and Paris, and is represented in private collections on five continents. He has been the recipient of several distinguished grants, fellowships, and prizes for his painting, including an extended Fulbright-Hays Grant for Painting to Madrid, Spain (1999–2001), where he was sponsored by the painter Antonio Lopez Garcia to study the works of Velazquez; a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, where he worked under acclaimed magic realist painter Gregory Gillespie; two grants for painting from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation; and a Stacey Foundation award for classical painting.

 

His proposed doctoral thesis in the history of drawing was realised in 2001 as “The Flowering Staircase,” a visual history tracing the 500-year collective biography of 185 master artists. Conceived as a kind of post-Cubist drawing of the history of drawing, the map uses educational genealogy as its factual structure, while recognising what is transmitted through those relationships: vision, precision of feeling, perception of form and color, creative performance, and the development of original visual language.

That same year, Timothy Stotz, Nicole Michelle Tully and Anthony Ryder co-founded Studio Escalier in Argenton-Château, France, as a one-of-a-kind figurative art program and international art colony, and co-taught its first programs through 2007.

In 2007, Mr. Stotz expanded Studio Escalier’s operations to include Paris, where its studio drawing programs were combined with daily study inside the collection of the Musée du Louvre.

With the creation of the Winter at the Louvre drawing program in 2009, The Flowering Staircase evolved from a visual history of artistic education into a sensory guidance system for Studio Escalier’s contemporary classical teaching: not a catalogue of historical styles to reproduce, but a map of artistic education and of the perceptual insights and pictorial poetics transmitted through it.

The museum as a library of visual ideas, the map with its set of paths and relationships, and the perceptual insights of teachers and students provoke active creative dialogue and a deeper culture of drawing from life. Together they provide a historical framework for testing vision, imagination, proportion, form, structure, colour, and pictorial organisation against present observation. Together they find and form new voices.

Over the following decades, this sensibility and approach has shaped the education of many hundreds of art students, emerging artists, and creative professionals from more than 60 countries and 45 US states.

After 25 years of continuous activity in Argenton-Château and Paris, Studio Escalier’s alumni can now be found in some of the most competitive universities, art schools, creative companies, art galleries and exhibitions in the world.

 

Timothy Stotz (b. 1969, Doylestown, Pennsylvania) received his MFA degree in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he was mentored by the painter, academic, and art critic Andrew Forge, N.A., and performance artist Nigel Rolfe.

Mr. Stotz studied privately in France with American realist painter and author Ted Seth Jacobs from 1993 to 2003. Additionally, he was a founding member of both the Jacob Collins Studio and the Water Street Atelier in Brooklyn, NY, while studying at the Graduate School of Figurative Art – New York Academy of Art.

From 1991 to 1993, Mr. Stotz studied drawing, painting, and anatomy with French artist Jacques Fabert, who in postwar Paris had been a student of the Cubist painters Fernand Léger and André Lhote — the latter a major figure in modernist art education and aesthetic theory.

Timothy Stotz received his B.A. cum laude in Fine Arts from Randolph-Macon College (Ashland, VA), where, on the advice of upperclassman Duane Keiser, he studied painting and art history under Raymond Berry.

Mr. Stotz lives in Montmartre with his wife, the painter Nicole Michelle Tully, and their daughter, in the same atelier apartment where Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Suzanne Valadon first met, first worked together as artists, and fell in love.