Vincent Desiderio at Quarantine
Vincent Desiderio is an American painter, a professor at the New York Academy of Art, and one of the most articulate minds in contemporary figurative painting. He shows at Marlborough Gallery in New York. His large-scale narrative paintings — Sleep, Cockaigne, Pantocrator — have placed him among the central figures of contemporary realism. He was born in Philadelphia, trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and has spent decades thinking about what painting is, what it does, and why most of what passes for art education is a beautifully constructed trap.
Vincent Desiderio has been part of this project longer than Quarantine itself has existed. He came to Menorca for the first time as a guest of Menorca Pulsar — the workshop program that preceded Quarantine. He returned for a second Menorca Pulsar edition. When that program closed its doors and Quarantine was born in its place, Vincent didn't hesitate. He was mentor in Quarantine's first edition, Muse Hacking (April 2023), and came back for Strange Heaven (April 2025).
Four visits. Two programmes. One island. No one has been here more times, and no one has had a closer view of why the old format had to die and what replaced it.
Before Quarantine: the workshop that had to end
Menorca Pulsar was a painting workshop on Lazaretto Island. A good one. Vincent said so himself: "Your workshop is so impressive to me. I was very impressed by the seriousness of your endeavour and the quality of everything you are presenting here."
But a workshop — even an exceptional one — operates on a specific assumption: that there is something to teach, and that teaching it will solve the problem. Menorca Pulsar taught well. The mentors were extraordinary. The island was the same island. But the format had a ceiling, and the ceiling was this: the artists who came already knew how to paint. What they needed was not more instruction. It was a different kind of pressure.
So the workshop closed. Quarantine opened. And the man who had praised the workshop came back for something that deliberately refused to be one.
Vincent understood why. He had been saying it for years in his own classroom.
What Vincent Desiderio does not do at Quarantine
At the New York Academy of Art, Vincent Desiderio teaches. He lectures. He runs critiques. He stands in front of students and builds an argument about the history of painting, the structure of images, the relationship between technical narrative and dramatic narrative, and why most of what you were taught in your atelier programme is equipment that will eventually imprison you if you don't learn to see past it.
At Quarantine, he does none of that.
He does not teach a painting workshop. He does not demonstrate oil painting technique. He does not offer an atelier-style critique of your drawing. He does not deliver the kind of masterclass where you sit in a lecture hall and take notes on Caravaggio's use of light — though he could do that better than almost anyone alive.
What he does instead, in three private 45-minute mentorships over the week, is sit with you and your painting and treat you as what the New York Academy cannot: not a student, but an artist with a specific problem that no curriculum was designed to solve.
The difference between his classroom and his mentorship is the difference between learning about painting and being seen as a painter. One gives you equipment. The other shows you what you're doing with it — and whether what you're doing is yours, or a very convincing performance of someone else's decisions.
From his masterclass: fragments
We don't publish masterclass transcripts. What happens on the island stays on the island. But Vincent Desiderio thinks out loud in a way that is rare — dense, erudite, and disarmingly honest. Here is some of what stays with you after he speaks.
On skills and what they don't do:
"Skills do not make an artist. They're helpful, and we need lots of skills. But among the manual skills, we also need a mental dexterity — the ability to think critically, to analyse, and to make decisions about what is the proper way for me in particular to be working at any given time."
Vincent draws a hard line between competence and artistry. You can learn to draw like the French academies taught. You can master the atelier method. You can render flesh tones that make other painters weep with envy. And none of it will make you an artist. It will make you skilled. Those are not the same thing.
"The problem with learning to draw in this French academic way is that the tendency is to try to force every idea you will ever have as a painter into that system. And sometimes the system can't accommodate your idea — so you wind up sticking a round peg in a square hole."
If you've spent years in atelier training and still feel like something fundamental is missing, Vincent would say: that's not a failure of your effort. That's the system working exactly as designed — and the design has a flaw.
On teaching and its traps:
"A lot of teachers try to take students and crush them and rebuild them in the teacher's image, which is terrible."
"Many of the schools today are in a state of crisis in regard to painting curriculums."
Vincent teaches at one of the most prestigious art academies in the world. And he will tell you, without flinching, that the academy model has a structural problem: it produces people who can execute but cannot think. People who can render but cannot decide. People who have been given every tool except the one that matters — the ability to know when the tools are getting in the way.
This is not cynicism. It is a diagnostic observation from someone who has spent decades inside the system and loves it enough to say what's broken.
On the worst and the best painters:
"The worst painters answer the questions. The best painters keep the question open and alive."
This might be the single most useful sentence Vincent has ever said for the kind of artist who comes to Quarantine. If your painting answers its own question — if it does exactly what you intended, looks exactly like the reference, arrives exactly where you planned — it may be technically excellent. It is also, in Vincent's framework, illustrational. Finished. Dead.
"Illustrational paintings are overthought. They do exactly what they're supposed to do, and there's no mystery to it. No enigma — which I think is the central aspect of painting: that it is always a perpetual question and never an answer."
On the crime at the centre:
"I think that in all great painting, there's a crime at the centre of it. An almost imperceptible crime. It's the deception of the painting."
Vincent borrows from Degas, who said that painting should be constructed like the perfect crime. And from Picasso, who called it a lie through which the truth is revealed. The painting is an artifice. A constructed thing. It is not your raw nerve endings on the canvas. It is not your diary. It is something you build with deliberation, with strategy, with what Vincent calls ice water in your veins — and the construction itself is what reveals the truth. Not sincerity. Not emotion. Structure.
"I would encourage you to paint with ice water in your veins, as if you're building a kind of shield around yourself. But that shield is an ekphrasis. That shield is the shield of Achilles — it interrupts the narrative of your life and makes you see."
On finding your way through the opposite:
"If I want to paint my child, and he's so beautiful, and I want to capture this — I would think about him dying. I would go in my heart to the exact opposite of what I feel. I would feel the horror of all of that, and I would work my way back out of that to him, to this beautiful thing."
This is Vincent at his most counterintuitive. The saccharine version of the painting — the one that tries to capture beauty by pursuing beauty — produces sentimentality. The version that goes through the opposite, that travels through horror to arrive at tenderness, produces something that cannot be faked. The route to authenticity passes through its negation.
"So often I will, if I have an idea, I'll contemplate its opposite. And I'll try and see if by working through its opposite, I actually manage to find my way in the journey back to something else."
On the anxiety of influence:
In his Menorca Pulsar talks, Vincent spent hours tracing how painters escape the gravitational pull of the artists they love. Gorky imitating Picasso so slavishly it was heartbreaking — and then, painfully, finding his own abstract expressionist language. Diebenkorn so captivated by Matisse that you couldn't tell their paintings apart — until he found Ocean Park by looking at the geometry Matisse had hidden behind the figures.
The lesson is not that influence is bad. The lesson is that the trap of influence is invisible to the person inside it. You think you're making your own decisions. You're making your teacher's decisions. Your idol's decisions. Your academy's decisions. And the escape is not more technique. It is a different kind of seeing.
"It's really almost heartbreaking to see how hard it was for him to escape from this trap."
If you've ever looked at your own painting and felt, with a sinking certainty, that you were looking at your teacher's painting — Vincent knows exactly where that feeling comes from, and exactly why another workshop won't fix it.
On consciousness and the trance:
"When we fall into the kind of trance of work, it's not as if we're shutting our brains off. I think we're reaching a different level of consciousness. And at that level, certain things are possible that are not available outside of the process."
This is Vincent's answer to the question every blocked artist asks: why can't I get there anymore? The trance is not mystical. It is a specific cognitive state that painting makes available — but only when the conditions are right. When the conditions are wrong — when you're overthinking, when you're performing, when you're painting toward a destination you've already decided on — the trance doesn't come. And without it, the painting is competent but lifeless.
On what we leave behind:
"How can we enrich the soil again, not for ourselves as much as for our children and our children's children? What kind of equipment are we going to leave behind so that they can actually thrive?"
Vincent thinks in generations. Not in careers, not in exhibitions, not in sales. In generations. What are you building that will outlast you? Not your painting — your way of thinking about painting. That is the equipment. That is what matters.
Four visits: from workshop to Quarantine
No other artist has seen this project from the inside at every stage. Vincent came when it was still a painting workshop. He came when the format changed. He came back again. And again.
He doesn't return because the island is beautiful — though he loves it. He doesn't return because we ask nicely. He returns because something happened here that he hadn't seen anywhere else, including his own academy.
After his first visit to Menorca Pulsar, he said: "I definitely want to come back. I think it's just great. You run a very professional, very considerate, very hospitable and generous workshop."
After Quarantine replaced it, he didn't say that anymore. He didn't need to. The word workshop no longer applied, and what replaced it didn't need his endorsement — it needed his presence.
The fact that a professor at the New York Academy of Art keeps returning to a programme that is not an academy, not a workshop, and not a masterclass is itself a statement about what those formats cannot do. Vincent can teach anywhere. He comes to Quarantine because this is where the teaching stops and something else begins.
This is not an art retreat
If you're looking for an art retreat in Menorca where Vincent Desiderio gives a lecture on the history of figurative painting and you go home with a notebook full of references, this is not it. If you want an atelier workshop where a master painter corrects your drawing, this is not it either. If you want a painting masterclass with structured lessons and clear takeaways, you already know what Vincent thinks about clear takeaways: the worst painters answer the questions.
But if you've been through the academies, the ateliers, the workshops, the residencies, and you still feel like the painting coming off your easel belongs to someone else's decisions — if you can execute anything but can't decide what's worth executing — Vincent Desiderio is the kind of mind that makes that problem visible. Not by diagnosing you. By thinking out loud in your presence, in a way that makes the walls of your own assumptions suddenly, uncomfortably transparent.
"Painting is a perpetual question and never an answer."
If you're tired of answers, the island is waiting.
→ Vincent Desiderio interview at Quarantine → Vincent Desiderio on Instagram → Vincent Desiderio at Marlborough Gallery
Vincent Desiderio has mentored at Quarantine's Muse Hacking (2023) and Strange Heaven (2025). He was also guest artist at two editions of Menorca Pulsar, the workshop programme that preceded Quarantine on Lazaretto Island.