SACI Summer Term

After the Late Spring term ended those who were staying got a week off. The rest of my family came to Italy during my finals week and spent it in Venice where I joined them when I was done. After a day with me there we all went back to Florence.

My parents rented an apartment right down the street from me, not 10 minutes away from where I was and still in the middle of everything. On top of that they also had air conditioning, something we did not have and let me tell you something: Italy is HOT in the summer time not to mention Florence isn’t very windy so the air is heavy too.

Alas, the week ended and my family left me and my sister once again. I really didn’t want them to go, didn’t really want to stay. I had no friends in SACI, was talking to my roommates less and less as they went drinking more and more, and my sister could only come over so often with her own class schedule. 

Classes helped. For the Summer term I took Intermediate Sculpture and an Into to Black and White Film Photography class. Since the term was only for 4 weeks this time we were in classes longer. In the first term we were only in class for 32 hours a week, this time it was 40.

I have to say that while I enjoyed all of my classes, these two were my favorite. 

In sculpture there were 5 people: 3 beginners, 1 intermediate, and 1 advanced. That being said I was the only one who had ever taken a drawing class before and incase you didn’t know the two are very closely related: sculpture is basically 3D drawing. Anyway, this meant that I had an advantage in the class which was nice but just meant that John, our teacher, expected a bit more from me.

We were only suppose to do two projects: a clay to plaster project, and a soft stone project. The clay to plaster was basically taking a clay slab, making it into a relief from the live model, making a plaster cast, the coloring it. Everyone was doing high relief, they could add on clay and take away to make large shifts in the physical depth of the clay. Of course the intermediate and advanced had to do low relief, could only take away and the over all amount couldn’t be too much since the point was to give the illusion of depth only. Like I said, drawing skills helped and in the end Sara (the advance student) gave up and just did something else).

Here is the clay version before it got covered in plaster, casted, and painted.

We then moved on to soft stone and again had to do a relief. The difference in material was noticeable and at first I had problems, but after a trip to see Michelangelo’s David and Slave figures, I understood the process a lot better. 

Honestly I like the non-colored one more but he wanted it painted so there you go. The drawing classes did help, but I never said I was awesome at it.

Again drawing helped and I finished the project very quickly in comparison to the others. I still had a week left and wanted to do another project. Something 3 dimensional and small so I could take it with me. My teacher was very nice and even let me work with marble. I came up with a small character design of a little boy angle curled up on a pedestal. At first it was hard to see it, but I was able to get it down with the help of the sir compressor and finished it with one day to spare.

The angle I made out of red marble.

Now a bit about photography. I knew very little, and for film, next to nothing, but I wanted to learn. Ringling does have a good photography program but when given the choice of taking pictures in Sarasota verses Italy, Italy wins hands down. The good thing was that I already had an “eye” for the compositions thanks to indirect classes and this was basically a crash course in the process but I picked it up fairly quickly and ran with it. In the end I used about 150 pieces of photo paper, did 8 rolls of film, and had 96 prints of 25 different pictures. (Some were created to be multiples and others were trying different techniques). Overall the class was fun an I made some good friends there, kind of hard not to when you’re stuck in the dark room together 10 hours straight.

Finally the term ended. The summer abroad was nice, but I really missed home. By the time I got back I was only there for 2 weeks before leaving for school again. It wasn’t even that long since we were at the beach for a week of it. So basically I had one week to unpack, catch up with friends, spend time with my parents, shop for the new year, pack again, and maybe relax for a bit and not think about any work. 

So that was my summer, not that I really had one as it was full of classes and homework. And finally we’re at hie current year at least. I’ll have to do another post to catch up to what I’m doing now, but hopefully this will be regular, eventually.

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.