Daniel Licht (b. 1996, Los Angeles) lives and works in New York. His next exhibition will open at Ninetto, Athens, on June 12, 2025.

Painting wants a sense of life. That is what I learned at the Studio School.

When I was a student there, we spent days and months looking at lines and looking at light. I learned in those rooms to draw what I saw, and through this I came to know what it feels like when a drawing, any drawing, is alive. The Studio School gave me a taste for work that has a sense of life.

It is not difficult to teach someone to draw from life; it is harder to teach someone to draw life from life. The former is a question of technique; the latter is one of sensibility and time. The Studio School does not teach it, but it did facilitate this learning for me.

I had seen the film Gerhard Richter Painting before I started there. “It’s amazing,” Richter says, his eyes fixed upon the image of an ancient sculpture. “It has the right quality, the one I believe in…something that belongs to art and could be in any artwork, but in fact it’s rare. It’s very curious.” By the end of my time at the Studio School, I had developed a sense of what he meant.

It seems to me that the Studio School has been kept alive by its sense of life. Different artists with different visions have come and have gone, but an overwhelming sense of the importance of vitality, of lifelikeness of the deepest kind, has kept the school grounded from the start. It makes little sense to me to distinguish between works “abstract” and “representational,” and this non-distinction strikes me as central to the school: it is the belief that the work of art enacts its own reality. What matters is what feels like life.

I feel lucky to have studied at this place where ancient things still hold sway.

Daniel Licht
May 20, 2025