Thursday, September 27, 2012

SACI - Late Spring


The middle of May, two weeks after I got back from Ringling, found me on a plane with a bunch of other students to Frankfort to connect to Florence, Italy. All of us were apart of the Late Spring SACI (Studio Art Centers International) program. The first session would last 5 weeks. I would also be staying for the summer classes, so an additional 5 weeks (but one of those weeks were free from classes). 

I really didn’t like the idea of going away for 2.5 months, of basically not being able to be home practically all summer. The only good thing was that my sister Katie would also be in Florence for that whole time while studying abroad through her school FSU.

The Duomo. My apartment was right in front of it!
So for the Late Spring term I had two classes, Drawing and Ceramics at both the beginning level, and was in them for 32 hours a week. Ceramics needed legitimate college classes in order to move you up so my experience in high school didn’t matter. I did however have that for drawing since I had had 2 drawing classes, 1 figure drawing class, and 1 color theory class at Moore. But my feedback was more negative than positive so I figure that it wouldn’t hurt to re-learn some basics.

It's actually a box!
Coils, don't you love them. After 30 cm you don't. 
...making the handles was more annoying though.

The wheel took some getting use to....
Dragon made from hand in sculpture class.
The most interesting thing in class that we did was in ceramics a thing called Raku. It is a Japanese technique were you use special clay and glaze that can deal with temperature shock. The reason is that when firing, instead of raising the temperature slowly and decreasing slowly, you raise it slow then take it out. In America you then cover it in saw dust. This all results in the glaze cracking and giving you black vane-like webbing. (I went untraditional and made a series of snowmen for my family.) 

All my snowmen. It was really cool seeing how different they all turned out.
The red guy was the one with the most variety on him, some very dark while others were small spider lines. 
The classes went well. My drawing improved a lot. In ceramics I learned the wheel and made a few things on it. But really, this was Italy, so we went on a lot of trips to near by cities and towns. Over the course of the 10 weeks I would go to Venice, Verona, Rome, Pisa, San Gimignano, Fiesole, and Lucca.

The model, Lorenzo, was very lazy.


The 5 weeks of classes ended with a week off for those who are also doing the Summer term. For this week my whole family came over and stayed in town after being in Venice for the week of my finals. It was very nice to see my family again. I missed talking to my Dad, whom I would call every day when in America, and the 6 hour time difference was hard.

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