Intro painting: I've never done oils before, but I love them! So far I've painted one still life (of a white box and a white bottle, very exciting), and I just started on another more complicated one. My painting teacher is Ridley Howard, who once worked as a color mixer for Jeff Koons and so tends to be a stickler for color accuracy. He lets me paint what he calls "tight little paintings." We listen to a lot of Bob Dylan in the studio, which is a converted chapel from the fourteenth century that's been decked out with fancy sun-imitating lights.
Renaissance art history: This class is required, and our Saturday field trips correspond to what we're studying in class each week. It's interesting enough, but I took a similar class last year at Truman, and you can only stare at so many frescoes per week. Being in class is relaxing, though, because I usually make a cup of tea, and the lecture is a nice break from having to think for myself.
Advanced drawing: I'm getting a 400-level credit, but this class is a mixture of all drawing levels. It's taught by Imi Hwangbo, the softspoken drawing and sculpture professor who totes around her five-year-old daughter Mia on Saturday field trips. We have one assignment per week; last week's was to create an "Italian self portrait." Critiques are on Thursdays, and work ranges from my controlled graphite drawings to splattered paint on eight-foot wood panels. When I met with Imi the other day she reviewed my in-class work (gesture drawings of a still life) and told me I had to loosen up.
Italian: I'm in a class of six, and so far we've been reviewing very basic things like "Mi chiamo Becca, e sono di Saint Louis. Piacere. Potrei avere un cappuccino?" I've taken two semesters of Italian already, so this week I'm meeting with Marco, my teacher, and four other students for breakfast and more advanced Italian conversation. I'm not sure how well that'll work out, since I've forgotten a lot of what I learned last year, but hopefully it'll help jar my memory.
Italian Culture: I'm auditing this class because I wasn't sure if I would have enough time to do all the readings, but I haven't skipped a class yet. There are three people enrolled, plus four auditors, and we sit around a table in the auditorium and listen to Marco (who's fluent in French and English and has two PhDs) talk about Italian history through cinema. He doesn't quite understand how little we've been taught about Italy, so it takes a lot of filling in the blanks to try and grasp how neorealist film is a response to Fascism and the need for a national popular culture. Marco makes up for the pauses he takes to search for English words by gesturing emphatically with everything he says. So far we've watched 1900 and Amarcord.
I don't know too much about what's going on in the other classes, but the sculpture students had two weeks to make eighty sculptures, and they're due tomorrow so everyone's hurrying around right now. Well, I guess I'd better come up with an idea for this week's drawing assignment...
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