Great Lakes Academy of Fine Art

Great Lakes Academy of Fine Art is a small, private ARC-approved school and studio that focuses on drawing and painting. The program offers classical training modeled after and descended from the traditional European Atelier system that flourished in Paris in the latter half of the 19th century. All of the program time is spent at the easel, learning to see and translate the three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface using pencil, charcoal, and oil paint.

• Schedule: Full-time program, eight hours a day, five days a week, in a four-year session

The focus of the program is to bring out an individual’s level of craftsmanship based solidly within the great and unbroken Western art tradition. The full-time program consists of up to sixteen students, with three or four accepted each year, and students have access to the studio 24/7, 365 days a year. Drawing and painting are the only subjects offered, with no classroom settings or written exams, and teaching consists of weekly critiques where students show their mistakes and instructors demonstrate how to correct them. The program has a specific focus on what it refers to as “Classical Impressionism,” defined as “rendering form within a unified light effect,” and includes the Ruben’s Project, which was developed to give students experience in imaginative composition with the goal of making the resulting work look both natural and believable.

The leadership team includes Jeffrey T. Larson as co-founder, director, and full-time instructor; Patrick Glander as instructor; and Austin Jasurda as instructor. Jeffrey has been trained in the manner of the Old Masters at the Atelier Lack, a studio-school whose traditions and training methods reach back through Impressionism and the 19th-century French academies, and he has worked full-time in his studio for over thirty-five years. Patrick is a graduate of Great Lakes Academy of Fine Art and is now an assistant instructor at the school, and Austin completed his academic journey at the Academy in the spring of 2024. The Great Lakes Academy of Fine Art is an ARC-approved school.

The bell in the north tower of the building was cast in France in 1885, and the building itself was hand-built in the early 1920s. The last church service at St. Peter’s was held in 2010, and Jeffrey T. Larson purchased the building in the fall of 2015. The surrounding area was historically populated by Italian immigrants, many of them skilled stonemasons and bricklayers who built much of Duluth’s architecture and landmarks, including Enger Tower and this church.

Last updated February 22, 2026.