When I decided in the late 1990s to pursue art as a full-time profession, I took the view that, since this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, I should approach it seriously. That meant giving myself the most complete art education I could reasonably obtain.

As an adult, however, I was not in a position to spend four years attending art school full-time. I therefore had to find another route. This proved more difficult than I had expected, for two reasons.

The first difficulty was structural. Without the framework of a traditional art university course, I had to create my own programme of study.

The second difficulty was intellectual. The more I looked, the more I realised that no single programme, institution, or instructor seemed to provide the whole picture. Many academic courses gave strong attention to drawing and representation, but often paid less attention to design, which had become central to the modern art movement in the early twentieth century. Courses at contemporary and modern art colleges often had the opposite emphasis. They included abstraction, concept, and modernist ideas but sometimes gave less systematic attention to drawing, form, and the close observation of nature. To capture the essence of nature, rather than merely copy appearances, requires a wide range of foundation skills.

This was the context from which the Virtual Art Academy grew. Unable to find my path through a single institution, teacher, or method, I assembled my education over many years from workshops, specialist courses, private study, old and sometimes forgotten books, museum visits, plein air painting, conversations with other artists, and the continual discipline of painting itself. I studied traditional academic realism, the methods of the Impressionists, and the design principles of modern art, gradually realising that each tradition contained something essential but that none was sufficient on its own.

The Academy grew organically out of the notes I gathered and organised while building my own art education. I wanted to create a form of painting education that did not force students to choose between technical skill, perceptual sensitivity, modern design, and personal expression. Painting, as I came to understand it, is not simply a matter of copying appearances. It is a complex visual language involving drawing, form, colour, composition, brushwork, value structure, observation, concept, and process. A serious education in painting needs to develop all of these abilities in a connected and cumulative way.

As I documented what I was learning for my own use, I began to see that the material might have value for others. The early 2000s were also a period in which online technologies were becoming more capable, making it possible to present a structured course of study outside the setting of a conventional classroom.

The immediate structure of the Academy was also shaped by my experience teaching painting workshops in California in the early 2000s. I enjoyed teaching, but I became increasingly aware of the limits of the short workshop format. In a single week, it was possible to share useful ideas, demonstrate techniques, and give students a sense of direction. But it was not possible to transmit the deeper structure of an artist’s education. Much of what a painter needs to know has to be learned gradually, revisited repeatedly, and integrated through practice over time. This requires more information and more continuity than can be communicated in a week-long workshop.

What began as a teaching resource in 2003 gradually expanded into a larger educational system. Over the following two decades, it developed into the Virtual Art Academy: a structured online art school intended to provide students with a long-term path of study that they could follow from home, wherever they lived.

The significance of the Academy lies partly in its structure. I did not want to create a loose collection of painting tips or demonstrations. I wanted to build a curriculum. The programme was therefore organised as a four-year course of study made up of sixteen workshops and supported by an extensive art reference library. At its core are the nine building blocks of painting: drawing, form, colour, composition, brushwork, notan, observation, concept, and process. These building blocks reflect my conviction that painting ability develops through the strengthening of interrelated skills, rather than through isolated techniques or formulas.

This structure also allowed me to address a weakness I had seen in many forms of art education. Some programmes emphasise classical drawing and accuracy but give less attention to colour, modern composition, or personal meaning. Others emphasise creativity and self-expression but provide less systematic training in technical foundations. My aim was to bridge these divisions by bringing together academic realism, impressionist colour and light, modern abstract design, and the deeper question of how paintings create emotional and aesthetic responses.

The online format was important for practical reasons as well as educational ones. Traditionally, serious art education has depended heavily on geography, money, and access. A student needed to live near a good school, find the right teacher, attend workshops, or enter a full-time programme. Many dedicated painters could not do this. In this respect, the Virtual Art Academy belonged to a broader historical shift in which artistic knowledge could be preserved and transmitted beyond the walls of a physical institution.

The theoretical dimension of the Academy also became increasingly important to me. In the early stages of my research, I began to suspect that there were two very different philosophical approaches to art and that integrating them produced paintings with greater emotional impact. At the time, this was more of an intuition than a theory. My early work still had technical weaknesses, yet I found that some paintings nevertheless connected with viewers. This suggested to me that technique alone could not fully explain aesthetic response.

This was the origin of my work on visual music and visual poetry: the idea that painting is not only a matter of technique but also a deeper form of visual communication. It relies for its emotional effect on principles that artists have often understood intuitively and embodied in their work. A painting succeeds not only because it is accurate, skilful, or beautifully handled but also because it engages the viewer emotionally and aesthetically. It has structure, rhythm, harmony, surprise, meaning, and resonance. It affects the mind and body of the viewer.

In recent years, I have been investigating whether there is a solid scientific basis for these ideas. They began as hunches, although they were grounded in thousands of hours of study and artistic practice. For the past four years, I have been drawing on aesthetics, psychology, neuroscience, archaeology, evolutionary biology, and art philosophy in an attempt to understand more clearly how paintings affect us.

The more I examined this material, the more significant the implications appeared. There was substantial scientific support for many of the intuitions that had shaped my thinking, and much of the relevant science was relatively recent, emerging largely over the last twenty years. For that reason, it has not yet been widely absorbed into the art world, and very little of it has entered our systems of art education. I am preparing this research for publication in a new book and a series of articles that I plan to release over the coming months. My hope is that this work will contribute to a renewal of art teaching and contemporary art philosophy. The project has also attracted interest from a Chinese publisher, who sees potential for introducing these ideas into their extensive art university educational system.

This broader theoretical framework helped clarify what I had long sensed as a painter: that great painting operates through both visual structure and emotional meaning. It has visual music in its arrangement of shapes, values, colours, edges, and rhythms independent of its subject matter. It also has visual poetry in its power to evoke memory, association, subject matter, symbolism, and human feeling. The Virtual Art Academy, therefore, became not only a school of technique but also a framework for thinking about why painting matters. Many students have responded to this aspect of the programme, describing it as a change not only in how they paint but also in how they understand painting itself.

Looking back, I see the Virtual Art Academy as the result of a personal need that became a public educational project. I wanted the kind of training I had searched for as an artist: structured, comprehensive, practical, theoretically informed, and connected to the long traditions of painting. I wanted students to avoid the confusion of trying to assemble an education from scattered fragments. I wanted them to see painting as a disciplined art form in which skill, perception, design, emotion, and meaning are inseparable.

Its significance, therefore, lies in its hybrid character. It preserves the spirit of traditional artistic apprenticeship but translates it into a modern, international, online form. It respects the older skills of drawing, form, composition, and colour, while also recognising the importance of modern design, personal vision, and the science of aesthetic response. It is both practical and philosophical, both traditional and contemporary.

The Virtual Art Academy is my attempt to reconstruct a serious art education for the conditions of modern life. There is a need for more art in the world, and there is also a need for good art education to be more accessible. The academy reflects the belief that artistic knowledge can be transmitted across distance without losing depth and that students in different parts of the world can participate in a disciplined tradition of painting. Most importantly, it affirms the idea that painting remains a profound human activity: a way of seeing, feeling, thinking, and communicating through visual form.