Week 8

This is eight blog that I am doing while in Italy, and will probably be my last. Due to that our last week in Italy is actually like half a week and its a lot more laid back that week. The eighth week was classes at the villa again. We did about 15 hours of Italian and around 20 hours of the painting class. To me, Italian is the same old and I don’t feel like elaborating on it anymore.

One thing that I do have to say, is that in the last week of our Italian class, we had our final that was written and also oral exam. I have to say that I think I didn’t do to well. Learning another language is pretty hard and after some research, I found that Italian is supposed to be one of the top 10 easiest languages to learn. That just make things a little discouraging because everybody in the class is struggling. It comes to some easier than others and harder for others. I think that I’m pretty average with my learning. But, the Italian class was fun and hard at times, but I was pretty glad that I had the experience.

Since I’m on the topic of languages, being in Italy and being around a different environment where the people are different, the language is different, and communication is key but you can still get by; I want to learn another language. After being exposed to the Italian language, I don’t really want to pursue in learning that language. I’m probably going to try and learn Spanish because I have a few friends that speak it, and it would be fun to be able to communicate with them. I also might actually use it to being in the States. One thing that I hate about the United States and like about Europe is that people are multilingual. Going to Europe, people speak their own native language plus english on top of it. I don’t know why, but I love it and wish the United States was a lot like that.

As for the painting class this week, our professor decided to pick an artist that we had to either replicate or do a piece that was inspired from that artist. My artist that Jim gave me goes by the name of Mario Merz. He was in the movement, Arte Povera, which is a movement that artists build their pieces by using what they find around them. Merz for example would have to set up a show, and he would go to  the location and use whatever he found around the area. It could of just been metal poles, glass, etc. He was known for building domes and had an obsession with The Golden Ratio and the fibonacci sequence of numbers.

The piece that I chose to do was a piece that was inspired by Merz. I spent a bit of time on it and just painted the golden ratio which is a giant swirl that starts on the paper and goes out to the edge. I painted that yellow and painted a pattern around it of red and blue. Then I wrote the fibonacci numbers in the ratio. That took a couple hours. But, in the end I ended up getting an A on it.

When it came to the end of the painting class, which was in the 9th short week, we had to do a piece that we could choose whatever it would be. We were also going to have an art showing and have people come in from the towns and show our pieces that we have been doing over the past few weeks. My piece that I did consisted of origami and a painted piece. I took a big piece of paper and painted it with different shades of blue to try and make it look like water that you would look at from the top. I splattered it with white paint. I would lay that flat for viewing instead of hanging it up. I took 10 piece of white paper and splattered it with different colors and folded them into cranes and set them on top of the water piece for viewing. It was pretty good and I was impressed with it.

As for the art showing, it was a blast. We had a thanksgiving dinner even though we were in Italy. The show was a day after Thanksgiving and we decided to have a little ‘Merica there. There was food, there was wine, there was people; it was fun.

Week 7

Its been a while since I got back on here and actually did a blog. But, this would be the seventh week within Italy, and this is also our return trip from the travel week that I discussed in the previous week. The entire trip was a blast, but, its time that we get back to the grind of school and classes back here at the villa.

For this week, we started our classes back up and did an Italian class again and we started our painting class. We were also supposed to be doing our Journal and Blogging class on the side and with our own time. The Italian class is the same and its really starting to more challenging. We’ve been learning a lot and there’s just so much to each word. One word could have 10 different forms depending on how you use it. But, the whole Italian class has basically been the same as it as before. The only thing that I wish is that, in the beginning, we spent that first week in Rome and the second week in Naples going to museums and local towns. I wished that we had saved those first 2 weeks for being the last 2 weeks because then we could spend our time at the villa, getting used to the country and all the travel, while learning Italian so that we would be able to communicate with people when we went on those trips. It probably would of made things a lot easier for people because I remember some people saying that had a bit of anxiety especially with all the travel around. So, things just would of been much easier had we saved those for being the last 2 weeks.

As for the painting class, the first week was really a blast. We learned some basics of what to do and a bit of color theory. For the first week, we had to replicate a piece that we liked. We first had to come up with a rough draft drawing of the piece that we were gonna do. Then we had to have a painted rough draft drawing and we had to come up with the final piece along with a piece of our own that we painted.

For me, it was a bit difficult because I’m not too much of an artist. So, my drawing and painting skills aren’t quite as good as everyone else’s. I tried to the best I could and I thought that my stuff came out pretty good. For the piece that I chose to do my replication of, it was Starry Night by Van Gogh. I was going to do the whole thing, but I’m not really someone that can scale down pieces that well. So, I decided to just do the top right corner of the piece. The drawing was alright, and my painted rough draft turned out really well. The painted final wasn’t quite as good as the rough draft, but that’s what you learn in painting.

As for my piece that I chose to do on my own, it was something I did quickly because I didn’t really know what to paint at first. This week in Italy was actually pretty cold and raining all week. So, I just thought of fire and painted a candle. It turned out alright, I wasn’t too impressed with it.

At the end of this week, on Friday, we have our day off of no classes, but, we still do things for class. We went to a town called Asisi that has a pretty important church there along with some other structures. We went there and look at some paintings that went in with the painting class and we also got to check out some architecture of the local buildings. One thing that I loved about the town was the view. It sits on top of a hilltop and we hiked further up in the town and got to check out the view even more.