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.