Monthly Archives: April 2010

Part of my move toward supplying the CLU library with videos of watercolor artists includes these two new offerings that will be available for checkout: Visions of Venice in Watercolour by Ken Howard and Watercolour in Venice by John Yardley. These two artists from England (note the spelling of watercolor!) have visited and painted in Venice many times. They each have a distinct style: Yardley is more of direct painter like John Singer Sargent while Howard paints with transparent washes much like William Turner. The videos are an hour long and by watching you can see what it is like to paint in Venice. They each drag more equipment along than we will have for basics on our journey. For those of you who are really painters you might want to consider taking an additional block of 90 lb or 140 lb paper along with our sketchbook. That is what I plan on doing. We will look at all the options for the traveling painter during the semester so you’ll have time to plan. Ken Howard uses white paint to bring back some of the lights that he loses in his wash process. I will be taking along white and extra paint for those of you who burn through all of your pigment. If you are a beginning artist, don’t be frightened off. You’ll be making some really pretty colors run on paper to represent some really beautiful light reflecting off of the water. You may surprise yourself with your ability. Check out these videos and the others that we now have in the library. Happy painting!

Terry and I have been going back and forth on how much of the syllabus and material we should post here, on the blog, versus in the university’s Blackboard website. If you’ve noticed the syllabus page(s) changing, that’s why!

Blogs and Blackboard are good for very different things. Blogs are great for this kind of transparent discussion and for making material and information available to anonymous visitors. Blackboard, on the other hand, is great for quick, non-chatty information organization and dissemination.

The advantage of posting material here on the blog is that it becomes available to students, parents, and other scholars who may want to preview the class. The disadvantage is that it’s a bit more difficult to update and organize, and materials posted to a public blog must all be copyright-free, or at least copylefted.

The advantage of posting material to Blackboard is that it’s very easy to update and rearrange information, and  we can post copyrighted articles and images available for educational use under access-limited conditions but inappropriate for publication on a public site.  The disadvantage, of course, is that anyone who isn’t enrolled in the class can’t see it.

We love technology, but sometimes it’s a challenge deciding which technology is best for any given purpose. The trick is to figure out how these two content-management sites can be used to complement each other, rather than duplicate each other.

Another  technology that both Terry and I feel very enthusiastic about is the iPad. I just received mine, and while it’s not the perfect travel-prof’s companion yet — it needs to be able to accept camera memory cards first — it’s definitely going to be useful on the road.  We plan to download travel books, language dictionaries, and itineraries to it that we can consult as needed as we walk through the city. We also plan to store a large selection of art on it so that we can take students to, say, look out at San Giorgio Maggiore or La Salute and simultaneously show them all the famous paintings and photographs taken of the same scene over the last century. I’d also like to store a handful of video clips on it so that, for example, we can stand in front of the restored Santa Maria dei Miracoli and compare it to what it looked like when Donald Sutherland ran past it in Don’t Look Now.  One note — since Venice isn’t built for signal reception (it has thick stone walls everywhere!), we expect to be limited to material we can download to the iPad, which wouldn’t necessarily be the case in other cities.

(Image courtesy of Apple PR)

Confession time: I grew up playing and running Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, I was About.Com’s Guide to Roleplaying Games for a number of years, and I still manage to make it out to a tabletop AD&D game once a month. At one point I had an extensively developed personal campaign world, Samru, in which I set complex campaigns for over fifteen years.

This image is a very tiny version of a very old map I drew of the fantasy city Saldon. Saldon was the setting for a novel I was writing while I was in high school and then turned into a city setting for a roleplaying campaign.

Not surprisingly, considering that I was living in Naples while I was in high school writing about Saldon, it’s an amalgam of two Italian cities that left a distinct impression on my teenage imagination: Capri and Venice. Saldon is a terraced, closely built-up city on an island (akin to Capri), in which one of the terraces has collapsed and now consists of canals running through crumbling old buildings (the Venetian influence). The “sunken” terrace was, in my writing and roleplaying, a haunt for the rejected parts of society: the impoverished, the outcasts, and the anti-authoritarian.

One of the challenges facing me as I develop this class is the same one that we’ll be posing to our students — to define Venice as a personal symbol. As I contemplate what Venice means to me, I realize how long and in how many ways it’s had an influence on my own imagination. I lived in Italy from ages 15 to 18; I think I visited Venice twice during that time, once with my family and once on a school field trip. I returned to Venice while I was attending college, visited it again in 2000, and then lived there for several months in 2006. Why does the city keep drawing me back? Why have I incorporated it into my fiction and my roleplaying? What does that method of incorporation suggest about how Venice operates as a personal symbol in my psyche?

I’m still working through the question. But I hope our students will find Venice as memorable as I did as a teenager, when I first stepped out of the train station and saw its timeless canals and churches spread before me like the promise of a future I never could have imagined.

Today I received permission from an artist I admire, April Gornik, to link her essay on visual literacy to my blogs.

I linked it here as well as on my blog so that I can direct my Visual Art in Ed students to read it as part of their homework. April addresses some important points about the ubiquitous visual images that bombard our senses in contemporary society. We become desensitized to these images and presume to know about things that we have merely experienced through a photographic reproduction. Here is the value of traveling to see important historical places, objects, and buildings. Here is the value of traveling to see natural wonders. You can’t know what the Grand Canyon is until you have stood at the rim even though you might have seen hundreds of beautiful photos of it. It is one thing to say you understand the construction and floor plans of a Gothic cathedral but until you have entered that space and experienced the deep sense of other worldliness, you cannot know the transforming power of architecture. And to stand in front of some of the great works of art as April describes is nothing like looking at a poor reproduction in a book. Check out the whole essay here. I think we will be using some of ideas as we talk about Venice as a symbol and how traveling abroad is a meaning-making, very enriching experience for all who go with a mind to become truly engrossed in another place.

Visual Literacy Essay by April Gornik

Terry and I are taking our class preparation very seriously. Since one of our goals is to discuss depictions of Venice across all media, I, as the film theory half of the partnership, have been dutifully checking out various Venice-related movies with an eye toward using them to enhance our lectures.

As a result, while Terry was getting her abstract accepted for “The Renaissance of the Pilgrimage,” I rented Sharks in Venice (Lerner, 2008) and forced us both to watch it this weekend. Hmm. That may reflect poorly on how much I’m contributing to the course….

WARNING: SPOILERS!  What can one say to adequately describe this cinematic, er, feat? It stars Stephen Baldwin, Vanessa Johansson, Hilda van der Meulen, Giacomo Gonnella, and a great deal of stock footage of shark attacks. We think the director did, indeed, go to Venice to shoot footage, although we’re not entirely convinced that any of the actors ever set foot in Venice. We’re also not entirely convinced that anybody involved with the film is familiar with the term “continuity editor.” Pity, although it meant we did excitedly stop and back up the DVD several times during the movie to ensure that we did, indeed, see what we thought we saw. Like that leg Stephen Baldwin lost underwater that miraculously reappeared a scene later, without even the slightest mention of prostheses or months of physical therapy. Or the gondolier who wisely vanishes off the back of the gondola before the shark attack.

And I really need to buy my nephew the wetsuit capable of hiding a machine gun without any unsightly bulges and the mouthpiece that will allow him to talk underwater in voiceover.

My esteemed colleague insists that if we feed students enough pizza they’ll sit through an after-class screening of all 88 minutes of the film.  I’m not so certain. Maybe if we order enough grease-laden meat on the pizza, sheer digestive overload may keep them in their seats, in which case I hope they’ll take the time to work through the mangled logic of the villain’s master plan and then explain it to me.

Nevertheless, I think this movie has to become part of our lecture series. Maybe under “Venice as Symbol: Decadent and Dying.”

Now, where to put that gondola chase scene in Moonraker….

Looks like I’m presenting at the Southeastern College Art Conference in October!

Here is the abstract for “The Renaissance of the Pilgrimage”

Imagining Venice
A pilgrimage to Venice, “La Serenissima,” was obligatory for those making the Grand Tour since the seventeenth century, especially for artists. From Turner to Stieglitz, artists set up their easels or cameras at specific sites in the city to transform these views into resplendent visions. My dream to recreate such a visit took flight with a chance encounter with a professor of Communication, and the collaboration has resulted in a course for students at the university to learn about and reflect on the history, art, architecture and performing arts of the city, the techniques of watercolor, and on Venice as a symbol that permeates Western culture (even Venice, California, and Las Vegas!). A post-semester trip in May, 2011 will include a stay in a palazzo to allow students to walk in the footsteps of the masters to create a personal record of their pilgrimage. This presentation will review the process by which this course has evolved and the outcomes expected when students encounter the masterpieces of some of the artists of the past who were influenced by Venice, and when they endeavor to put their own experience with the city to paper and to contemporary visual media.

It’s easy to plan a trip by thinking,  “well, students won’t want to spend all two weeks in Venice, so we’d better throw in some side excursions and take them down to Florence to make sure we attract enough to ‘make’ the class.”  And that kind of pragmatic planning can’t be ignored. But I dipped into the academic literature on travel courses today and quickly found “Travel as Performed Art” by Judith Adler, which offers another way in which to consider travel planning:

Travel undertaken and executed with a primary concern for the meanings discovered, created, and communicated as persons move through geographical space in stylistically specified ways can be distinguished from travel in which geographical movement is merely incidental to the accomplishment of other goals. Whether skillfully fulfilling the conventions of a canonized tradition without any deviation, deliberately challenging received norms, or being led through the motions of a “packaged” performance designed and sold by  others, the traveler whose activity lends itself to conceptual treatment as art is one whose movement serves as a medium for bestowing meaning on the self and the social, natural, or metaphysical realities through which it moves. Performed as an art, travel becomes one means of “worldmaking” [...] and of self-fashioning. (p. 1368, emphasis added)

In an ideal world where cost was no object, Terry and I would have loved to create a “Grand Tour” class, which would be the “conventions of a canonized tradition” version mentioned above. As it is, we’re offering something more pop-culture, the “‘packaged’ performance,” although I hope that by involving students directly in artistic process and requiring an active, ongoing level of meaning-making, we can turn the process itself into art.

This is something to keep thinking about as we plan….

Source: The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 94, No. 6 (May, 1989), pp. 1366-1391 Published by: The University of Chicago Press. Online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2780963

Dru has been telling me that I’ll get a conference paper or two out of the development and execution of what is really a course and trip of my dreams. Okay, I find that “do what you love and work is not work” comes to mind here. So I went to research the possibilities for a paper and found “The Renaissance of the Pilgrimage”, a call for “submissions on a journey of love to ground zero of our desires.” Well, isn’t that exactly what we are doing with Imagining Venice? For my part, since I became a faculty member at CLU teaching watercolor, I have been talking/dreaming about walking in the footsteps of my watercolor heroes: Turner, and Sargent. Dragging along a dozen students to Venice seemed like the closest I could get to spreading the enervating joy I feel in the presence of my art gods. Standing where they stood, painting where they painted, seeing the light of a magical city transformed onto the pages of my sketchbook; this is heady stuff. So go see the link under ART resources for a little info on the grand tour. We may be only going for two weeks, but you’ll certainly experience the grandness of traveling with paints. We are very lucky to be living in this time where travel around the world has been made available to more people than just the rich. The “Grand Tour” is within your reach!

Call for papers from http://www.secollegeart.org/forms/2010_Call_For_Papers_SECAC_MACAA.pdf, “The Renaissance of the Pilgrimage”, Martina A. Pfleger Hesser

Students will view the city through the eyes of the artists, photographers, writers, musicians, and film makers who have been inspired by Venice for centuries. After discovering these viewpoints during the semester, students will walk in the footsteps of Turner, Sargent, Vivaldi, Ruskin and James to discover Venice as a symbol of their own.