former wall street trader launches fully funded arts academy for u.s. veterans
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Press release Former Wall Street Trader Launches Fully Funded Arts Academy for U.S. Veterans
RED BANK, New Jersey (Jan. 11, 2017) — The Ani Arts Academy America last month began accepting applications from veterans of the U.S. armed forces for rolling admissions to a tuition-free art school that specializes in realistic drawing and oil painting.
The new non-profit academy plans to instruct twenty-one students in hyperrealistic art with a methodology devised by Anthony Waichulis, a hyper-realistic painter and educator who currently runs the Ani Art Academy Waichulis in Bear Creek, Pennsylvania.
Ani students, or apprentices, focus on repetition exercises, layering on one skill after another with technical mastery as the overarching goal. The curriculum covers drawing,
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materials, anatomy of form, natural forms, and painting techniques. The school expects full-time students to graduate after three to four years.
The academy was opened by Tim Reynolds, who co-founded Jane Street Capital in 1999 but left the Wall Street firm in 2012 to focus on the development of art academies around the world.
The new Red Bank school joins a burgeoning collection of Ani Art Academies now open in Anguilla, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, with Dominican Republic scheduled to open this summer. Another school, the Ani Art Academy Waichulis, grooms teachers for dispatch to the far-flung academies.
Each of the overseas academies is complemented by a private resort, also named Ani, that helps fund Reynold’s philanthropic mission. Ani is a play on a Swahili word that describes movement of people “on a path or great journey.”
Reynolds conceived Ani Arts Academy America as a sanctuary and a springboard for disabled veterans. He himself lost the use of his legs after a car accident in 2000, and emerged from that experience with ambitions to address the despair that often attends a disability.
“Many of the people I met had completely given up,” said Reynolds. “Psychologically, people need stuff to do. It keeps you going.”
The endgame at the academies, according to Reynolds, is the development of art skills that can be adapted and applied to an array of artistic and creative endeavors. Ani students frequently exhibit work at galleries across the country and have generated a number of notable sales.
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The new non-profit academy plans to instruct twenty-one students in hyperrealistic art with a methodology devised by Anthony Waichulis
Stephanie Gronchick, the Academies’ general administrator, said it costs between $12,000 and $15,000 to educate a single student per year, and that tuition for such a program would cost considerably more.
http://aniartacademies.org/
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