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The Jerusalem Studio School, a private Jerusalem art academy, premiered its Transcriptions II exhibition on Thursday, February 18th at 19:00 at the Jerusalem Theatre. The school's advanced students, representing the rising generation of Jerusalem's artists, have used charcoal to create large-scale tributes to master works by Caravaggio, Titian, Velasquez, and others - presenting a dramatic view into the artist's creative process.

But the works on display are hardly mere regurgitations. According to renowned artist Israel Hershberg, founder of the Jerusalem Studio School, "At the JSS, transcriptions are studies done after great masterworks of the past. They may be referred to by some as copies. They are not, however, meant to be hand-made reproductions of past masterpieces. They are also not meant as grand displays of facility or technical prowess, nor are they the merchandise of the product oriented mentality that triumphs in much of today's art world. Transcriptions are humble studies; exercises in artistic self-effacement, and extended dialogues aspiring to intimacy with great works in the language of their own creation."

The students worked from small prints of the paintings, utilizing the rules of proportion to transfer the images onto large sheets of paper, rendering them fully in black and white. Pushing the concept to its limits, the projects required hundreds of hours of intense effort in order to capture and appreciate the art of the original, a daunting and humbling undertaking for an art student. Hershberg therefore calls the renderings "unique acts of research that can lead the artist toward nuanced understandings of pictorial structures and hierarchies, unobtainable by any other means."

The opening of Transcriptions II comes at a time when Jerusalem has finally begun to feel like a city full of young people highly involved in the creative arts scene. The Bezalel Academy, a modernism-inclined institution of international repute, is now teaming up with the student body of the Hebrew University for an enormous Purim party extraveganza that straddles the line between alternative artsy credibility and mainstream youth entertainment. The Ruach Chadasha (New Spirit) NGO recently spearheaded an initiative called Urbanica, which transformed a blighted shopping center into a rent-free arts workshop incubation space. And many of the city's performance spaces, arts collectives and creativity-minded organizations teamed up a few weeks ago for a two-day Jerusalem alternative arts scene showcase called De:Frost.

Even the municipal government seems bent on getting in on the game, having produced a student-friendly warehouse party complete with safety-themed interactive installations and marquee entertainment in City Hall's parking garage in November, and gearing up for an upcoming open day at many of the city's art schools next week. 

Yet the Jerusalem Studio School's affinity for the classics is what makes it the exception to the trend that it is a part of. The students who study at the school might be visually indistinguishable from the city's other art scenesters, and they may hang out at the same haunts, but you won't see interpretations of the Italian masters on display at Uganda.

The Transcriptions II exhibition remains on display through Thursday, March 18th, 2010.