Bringing Beauty Into the World / Text by Jennifer Long for SCAD Magazine

Bringing Beauty Into the World

SCAD Professor James Langley balances career as Teacher and Artist. Text by Jennifer Long, Photos by Wayne Moore . Fall 2006 Edition of THE MAGAZINE, Savannah College of Art and Design, volume 10 number 1.

For a painter who has been commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center, and who has taught at universities and museums around the world, Savannah College of Art and Design professor James Langley finds his ideal subjects exist remarkably close to home.

  "I dream most about being at home painting my beautiful wife and children. They are my muses," he said. "Of course, this aspiration is consistent with my desire to make a lasting contribution to a renewed vitality in the art of the figure."

 Langley, a SCAD foundation studies professor since September 2005, is an artist whose passion for revealing the subtleties and beauty of the human figure is evident throughout his impressive and diverse body of work.   This passion also is evident in his classroom, where he instructs students in the principles and elements of drawing and design. And for Langley, the interconnection between his family life, professional work and quest for educating students is as natural as the human form itself. 

 Langley grew up in a household where making art was encouraged. "As a child, I never thought of becoming an artist, since it was such an embedded aspect of my growing up in a large family where creativity was our entertainment," he said.  "Instead I dreamed of being an athlete, a soldier, a mountaineer, a doctor. But I began to recognize that being an artist was simply an acceptance of who I am."

Langley headed to college, earning a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. in painting from the New York Academy of Art. His educational experiences ultimately helped him form his own philosophy of teaching, including the importance of having professors who were working artists as well as teachers. "The teachers who have inspired me have all been working professionals, and many of them would bring that experience into the classroom," said Langley. "A balanced relationship between studio work and teaching is very important. It not only inspires but helps to keep the teacher focused and respectful of how difficult art can be."

Since joining SCAD, Langley has been working alongside other professors who also play the dual role of artist and professor. "It is such a pleasure to teach alongside other spirited faculty who are mutually committed to their profession as teachers and artists," he said. "Savannah’s temperate climate and rich urban fabric couple brilliantly with the college as a center of creative activity and make the prospect of continuing my professional work as an artist and teacher at SCAD an easy choice."

In addition, Langley said he finds the college’s School of Foundation Studies to be an ideal place for him considering his interest in drawing the human form. "The department is exemplary in terms of leading students to grasp the hard-won skills of drawing and painting, the nuts and bolts of every design profession," he said.

Prior to teaching at SCAD, Langley worked as an artist making murals for theater as well as for private, corporate and ecclesiastical clients who commissioned portraits, landscapes, altarpieces and designs that range from architectural to ornamental. He has exhibited continuously for the past 15 years, including a group show in New York City juried by painter Philip Pearlstein and a retrospective that included 65 paintings at the Butler Institute of American Art. Other exhibition venues include the Hurn Museum of Contemporary Folk Art in Savannah, the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., and Palazzo Valentini in Rome, Italy.

Most recently, Langley has been working on trompe l’oeil decoration for a new suite of classical galleries in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. "Collaborating with architect Thomas Gordon Smith and curator Peter Kenny in realizing their ideas has been invigorating," Langley said. "The focus of our project is not simply to remake the style of a particular historic epoch, but rather to allow the visitor to participate in the historic continuities that define good art and design."

 
In turn, the artwork that Langley has developed in his studio or on location clearly feeds into the instruction he gives to his students each quarter. "Making art inspires and enlightens my teaching," he said. "I draw alongside my students in order to provide an example and to be immersed in the creative process with them."
"When my students take with them the understanding that their new skills are an essential part of a lifelong creative discipline, then I know I have helped to set them on the pathway to mastery," Langley said. "The most important lesson they learn from me is that an artist does not simply produce commodities to be bought and sold. An artist is performing a philosophical act and has both the privilege and the responsibility to produce an image of perfection that will bring genuine beauty into the world."

Article by Jennifer Long. Family photos in studio by Wayne C. Moore.