Gary Adcock

When I was a student in college, I left my parochial New York City and began a journey of self discovery and realization which continues…

My wanderlust, idealism and intuition led me in a direction opposite from my peers. They went to Europe; I went to the Far East. I lived in Japan before the economic miracle, where I went to college in Tokyo for one year . In Japan, I was confronted with a world view 180° from my own. One day, I started to think in Japanese and the world opened up. I began to “see” differently and came to understand things for which I had no explanation.

This was my first understanding of the significance of language as a mental construct and its’ direct relationship with the perception of the physical environment. During this time I also studied with four Japanese print masters.

Their patience was humbling, their interest unwavering: ego-less, they gave me an enduring gift.

Many years later I realized another dream; to return to Japan as an Architect, but that is another story… Realizing dreams and goals has always been a part of my life. After being a successful architect for nearly thirty years, and having spent a life time traveling and passionately studying art and architecture all over the world, I had the dream of coming to Firenze to study, attend an academy of art and become a painter and so I did.

I believe that with clear intention, passion and perseverance, anything you can dream, you can do.

I was academically trained in Florence, where I encountered new “masters”. I began teaching while still a student and thereafter in summer workshops and privately in a small studio called “Studio de’Macci,” combining my western academic art training and all of my previous art studies with the philosophy of patience and compassion from my Japanese teachers.
My paintings and drawings are in private collections in Europe, the United States and Japan. Some of my work can be viewed on the Florence Art Studio website. Over the years, positive feedback from students has encouraged the development of this larger and more comprehensive studio – “The Florence Art Studio”. Since I started my art training relatively late in life, the sacrifices I have had to make and the challenges I have had to face in learning, have helped me become a sympathetic teacher. Each student is treated as a unique individual with specific needs and my teaching methods respond accordingly. As I strive to continue to improve myself as an artist, my goal as a teacher is to impart the same passion I have for knowledge and life-long learning, which has brought me to this point.
The interaction with my students makes me a better teacher and painter. I am still learning for it is a long patient search, on a steep path.

“From the age of six I had a penchant for copying the form of things, and from about fifty, I showed a number of drawings; until the age of seventy, nothing that I drew was worthy of notice. When I reach eighty years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at ninety to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at one hundred years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at one hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive.”

— Hokusai