About the Fellowship
The Masters Fellowship is a 2 year, fully funded program that provides emerging representational painters with the time, space, and resources to develop their artistic practice and launch their professional careers. Fellowships are awarded through a competitive application process that evaluates both their technical skill and their potential to contribute to the MAA’s mission of advancing the classical realist tradition. This Fellowship is quite exclusive and each year only 5-10 new Fellowships will be awarded. Masters Fellows are not students in the traditional sense. Although this is an educational environment meant for learning and growth where regular critiques will be given, it is meant to help Fellows become true professionals through the design and creation of their own ideas. We expect our Fellows to be self-motivated, disciplined, and have a strong work ethic.
At the Masters Academy of Art, we believe that great representational art should engage with the entirety of the human experience - including our joys and triumphs, as well as our struggles and sorrows. In a world where so many people feel isolated, we need artists who can create paintings that empathize and connect with people in a manner that provides solace and invites contemplation.
As a Masters Fellow, your mission will be to harness the emotive power of classical realism to craft visual narratives that reflect the human condition in all its complexity. Your paintings should grapple with universal experiences of loss, grief, loneliness, and existential searching, joy, hope and connection, in a way that is familiar to the common human condition. Your works should validate the viewer's own struggles and joys, while also pointing towards the possibility of healing, connection, growth and love.
Technically, we expect incoming Fellows to have a strong command of representational drawing and painting skills, akin to that of the great masters of the Western tradition. But even more importantly, we seek artists with the emotional intelligence, compassion and insight to sensitively render the subtleties of the human psyche. Your work should feel authentic and cathartic, without being overly sentimental or superficial.
We expect our Fellows to be self-motivated and disciplined in their work ethic, with an openness and collaborative spirit that is willing to accept advice and criticism and offer it back in the spirit of mutual benefit. The MAA aims to create an environment that promotes collaboration and regular criticism among peers, that inspires and energizes each artist individually and collectively. We believe that more masterful works can be accomplished through this collaborative effort than artists might otherwise achieve on their own.
While you will learn from historic masterworks, the settings, subjects and scenarios of your paintings should feel relevant to the struggles, joys and realities of contemporary life. We want to see poignant, relatable scenes like a person navigating the aftermath of loss, a moment of existential despair, or a quiet epiphany of self-acceptance. These can be balanced with depictions of the redemptive power of human connection, moments of grace and understanding between people, and other sources of light amidst the darkness. The goal is to create art that mourns with those who mourn, while also planting seeds of hope and connection, as well as showing the joys of life, love, and relationships.
In terms of specific subjects, we are open to a wide range and Fellows will have ample space to imagine and design, but all should be grounded in keen observation of the human experience. The common thread should be art that acknowledges the vast array of human experience with the ultimate goal of legible visual communication that brings immediate relatability, understanding and connection to viewers.
At the Masters Academy of Art we measure success by the depth of the emotional resonance and identification a work inspires in viewers. We want people to look at your paintings and connect in their own way, to recognize their own experiences reflected back at them. Of course, quality of craftsmanship is also paramount. If you share this vision for a more purpose driven art, and would like to be part of a creative, supportive community, we invite you to apply for our fellowship.
