Photos by Jim Coarse

In 1997, the artist Neil Carlin was on a train at one o’clock in the morning, careening past northern New Jersey towns on his way back to Kennett Square after having spent another Friday in the company of figure painter Michael Aviano at Aviano’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Carlin had begun studying under Aviano beginning the year before – a weekly visit he would continue until 2001 – and being in that apartment, listening and absorbing the clear education of art that had its basis in the fundamentals of form and composition, was unlike any form of teaching Carlin had been given before, not at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where he had received a BFA in illustration, and not anywhere else.

Through his earbuds, Carlin heard his late grandfather’s voice speaking to him.

“I asked myself, ‘Why do I have to make this trip up to New York? Why didn’t I get all of this teaching in college?’” Carlin said. “This isn’t rocket science. These teaching elements have been known for centuries. Why isn’t this same form of teaching available in Kennett Square?

“Then the lightbulb went off. I heard the voice of my grandfather in my head. He told me, ‘You can either spend your time complaining about a problem or fixing a problem.’ Aviano handed me such a clear education that I decided to stop complaining, be the answer to the problem, and bring it to Kennett Square. I felt a fire that other people in this area should have the same experience that I am having without having to travel to New York to get it.”

Carlin began his first art classes in the basement of his townhouse in Kennett Square in 1997, rented a studio above what is now Currie Hair Salon on State Street where he held classes until 2007, and in 2008, he opened the Carlin Academy of Art on Willow Street, where he has taken what he learned from Aviano and passed along those tutorials to hundreds of students who arrive at the studio every year, harboring a far-off and fanciful idea that imagines them living a creative life.

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Such is the destiny of facts.

There is not an individual alive who spends at least a portion of their upright hours on a dance recital floor or in a parent’s basement with a guitar or in a quiet room wielding either a notebook of sketched-out stories or a brush dripping with paint near a canvas who does so without the power of influence. Rimbaud had Verlaine. Monet had Daubigny. Hemingway had Twain and the war and Ansel Adams had the rocky and unforgiving terrain.

When he was a young boy growing up West Chester, the young Neil Carlin had comic books.

“A family friend took me to a 7-11 on Boot Road in West Chester and introduced me to my first set of comic books, and bought me my very first stack,” Carlin said. “For a quarter, I could pick up a magazine that gave me exciting stories and beautiful art, made by some of the greatest comic book artists in the world. I was immediately taken not just by the art, but by their narrative and compositional ability to tell a terrific story.”

As it often is with young artists who grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania over the last half century, the young Carlin collided headlong into the inevitable influence, and the race was now on.

“The first piece I saw as a child that created a strong emotional response was Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Christina’s World,’” he said. “I asked my mother for a print of it, because I kept finding things within it every time I saw it. The comics were fun, but this was a real painting of a real person, and it really moved me.”

Following his graduation from the University of the Arts, Carlin embarked on a successful freelance illustration career – consistently working for the Franklin Mint and other clients – but while his new career was earning him consistent work, Carlin felt the vacancy of knowing that in order to better utilize his gifts as an artist, he needed more training -- a teacher who would hammer home the repetitive importance of form and composition. He was about to pursue a master’s degree when he stumbled upon an oil class at the Chester County Art Association with West Chester artist, Michael Traines.

“Within the first 30 minutes of the first class, I knew this was the exact type of painting education I wanted to get in college but didn’t,” Carlin said. “Michael quickly told me that if I really wanted to get the full breadth and scope of the training he was offering at the art association, I should work directly with his teacher in New York City.”

That teacher’s name was Michael Aviano.

“Aviano was by far the best teacher I have ever had and have ever seen,” Carlin said. “His ability to clearly define the fundamental principles of drawing and painting and present them in an understandable fashion was simply unparalleled. His teaching ability was complimented by his rigorous curriculum that broke everything down to bite-sized chunks. It was an old-world class. You started where the master told you to start, and you only progressed when he told you that you finished the project to the degree that he was satisfied, and then you proceeded to the next project, and the next.

“That was exactly what I needed. There were no vagaries in his methodology. I was able to hear one voice with clearly defined concepts. I wanted to give others the same gifts I was receiving – to allow someone with a vision in their head the ability to hit that vision, to help them get there in a very concrete fashion.”

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The Carlin Academy of Fine Art offers a comprehensive program of study that trains its focus on the three fundamental disciplines of visual art: drawing, painting, and composition. Tailored to meet the needs of artists at all levels and across several mediums, Carlin works one-on-one with each of the students in his classes by introducing them to the fundamentals of art, project by project, in order to strengthen their confidence, control and mastery of technique and use of the materials. The Academy’s​ advanced curriculum in portraiture, still life and landscape opens the door to those students who have completed the core curriculum to finding their true expression of creativity.

“My classes are not about creativity, but about mastering the fundamentals of drawing and painting,” he said. “I tell my students that true creativity comes only after they master these fundamentals to the point where they become second nature, to the point that they are a part of them – to the point where they are breathing that language.

“Nothing hinders creativity like sloppy, undisciplined technique.”

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Carlin Academy of Fine Art is a working classroom of ideas, humming with activity along its nine stations, with each artist separated from the other by black cloth for privacy.

“In any given class, I can have one person working on a landscape painting, another beginning a drawing and another finishing a still life,” he said. “Regardless of where someone ends up in my programs, everyone goes through the same building bloc curriculum.

“There are a lot of teachers who focus strictly on teaching their particular style of painting. Rather, I am teaching them the language of painting, drawing and composition so they can confidently develop their own style.”

While much of his energy is focused on his Academy and his continuing work as a commercial illustrator, Carlin has still been able to establish and maintain a successful artistic career, exhibiting his work at several art museums including the State Museum of Pennsylvania. In 2003, his painting “Transcendence” was awarded First Place in the Still Life category of The Artist’s Magazine’s 20th Annual National Art Competition. In 2004, his painting “Emergence” received Second Place in the Portrait category of The Artist Magazine’s 21st Annual National Art Competition -- selected from over 12,000 entries nationwide. 

In a life led by influences, Carlin’s most impactful – and one that informs much of his art – has been his faith. Raised by parents who were Evangelical Christians, he was first drawn to the Catholic Church by the young woman who would eventually become his wife, Colleen Owens.

“Although I was raised in non-denominational churches, I was no longer involved in any religious affiliation after I graduated from U Arts and had begun my illustration career,” Carlin said. “I began to attend Mass with Colleen, and over time, I learned that many of the preconceived stereotypes I had about Catholicism were blatantly false, and I had this yearning to be in a liturgically structured environment.”

In 1999 – the year before he married Colleen -- Carlin attended the Right of Christian Initiation for Adults class at his local parish, and officially became a Catholic at the end of the year. For the past several years, he has specialized in large-scale sacred and devotional art for new and renovated parishes.  His client list includes parishes and shrines across the country, and he was the artist selected to paint the official iconic painting of the Holy Family for the 2015 World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia.

Carlin said the connection between his faith and his art is seen in the power of images.

“I was always haunted by cross, even when I totally abandoned churchgoing,” he said. “When I became a Catholic, I realized that I entered into a community that was still interested in images and saw the need for contemporary artists to create artwork for them.

“The Catholic Church still recognizes the power of art as an important contemplative and didactic tool, even as stripped down as churches have become. It has been an honor and a joy using my talents and skills to provide it for them.”

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There is very little about the interior infrastructure of the Carlin Academy of Art that would define it as being anything more than functional. There are no Victorian armchairs for the artists to rest in, no elaborate table settings for tea to be served between stints at workspaces and the rumble of large vehicles that drive by on South Willow Street do not lend themselves to the idea that the making of art is best done in the whispering sanctuary of a creative space.

Its magic, however, is found in the reams of notebooks filled with sketches and ideas, in the tactile and finite shape of chalk pieces and in the texture of rudimentary charcoal drawings and half-completed paintings and projects that form a kaleidoscope of tangible evidence that art is being made here.

For the past 27 years, Neil Carlin’s artistic life has been to be a receptacle and a conduit to others, in a space tucked inside what was originally a mushroom composting plant that is now an art studio on the edge of an old borough.

“Over the past 75 years, art education has been infected with the idea that you can get to the point of brilliance without first learning the fundamentals,” Carlin said. “The truth is that no one starts out having already arrived there, no one in any artistic endeavor – no dancers, no writers and certainly no visual artists. I’m trying to bridge the gap between Aviano’s Upper West Side apartment and Kennett Square and give my students the same access to a solid education that ultimately will bring them creative joy.”

​The Carlin Academy of Fine Art is located at 128 South Willow Street in Kennett Square. To learn more about classes and instruction, visit www.carlinacademy.com. For more information on Neil Carlin and his work, go to www.neilsoncarlin.com.

To contact Staff Writer Richard L. Gaw, email [email protected].