After three months of imagining how my series of paintings from Venice are meant to look, I finally have something that satisfies me. I don’t recommend trying to compete with all your art heroes on a deadline. In any case, “Imagining Venice” 2011 will culminate in a one-woman show in the Kwan Fong gallery at CLU in August-September of 2012. The show is the perfect introduction to advertising “Imagining Venice” 2013! Dr. Dru and I are very excited to bring the course to students who are interested in this city, its symbolism, and its inspiration throughout history. We have added Verona into this trip to accompany our original in-depth look at Venice and 3-day journey to Florence. Stay tuned for more information.

This group of students has amazed me with their dedication to painting while on our trip. No time more so than the 6 a.m. trek to Piazza san Marco to catch the sunrise view of San Giorgio Maggiore. I have proof of their diligence that I am showing here. Everyone is getting much better at recognizing and then painting my obsession over the light of Venice. Note the yellow glow on the Chiesa Santa Maria della Salute in the background!

Our students may have the opportunity to visit the 16th-century church of San Sebastiano to view the art restoration project going on there, thanks to the generosity of Save Venice. San Sebastiano, one of five churches in Venice built to thank God after the plague passed through the city, is noted for its cycle of paintings by Paolo Veronese, who is buried there. Other notable pieces in the church include works by Sansovino, Tintoretto, and Titian.

Saint Sebastian is believed to offer protection from the bubonic plague and is the patron saint of archers and athletes. He is often depicted in his martyrdom, tied to a post and shot with arrows.

Save Venice’s restoration work at the church includes conserving the walls and ceiling, to protect Veronese’s work, and to restore the marble floor and replaster the church’s facade and exterior walls. This work will give Save Venice a chance to further study Veronese’s work.

Save Venice was founded in 1967 and has completed more than 200 restorations in Venice. One of my personal favorites is the astounding work it did on Santa Maria dei Miracoli, a small marble-covered church close to the apartment I stayed in during my sabbatical in Venice; the restoration turned it from a dull, gray building to a bright, glittering jewel.

While talking to Terry about this class today, I suddenly remembered another manga/anime series besides Hetalia that refers to Venice — Aria, set in the early 24th century on the planet Aqua. In this highly praised series, 15-year-old Akari Mizunashi comes to the watery planet to learn how to become a gondolier in the tourist-ridden city of Neo-Venezia. It’s interesting, given our recent post on the struggle female gondoliers have been facing to be accepted in Venice, that all of her fellow “undines” (as they’re called in the series) are female, as well.

The city of Neo-Venezia was created in honor of the Earth city of Venice, which was destroyed, according to the series, in the 21st century.

The manga has been given high reviews for its quiet, introspective mood and beautiful artwork, and the equally lovely anime is available in English from Right Stuf (see official website). This illustration from the anime shows our heroines standing in Piazza San Marco next to the doge’s palace… but you recognized the setting already from browsing our photos, didn’t you?

Here’s the trailer, for anyone interested!

The CLU library has a new addition to the growing collection of all things Venetian. Richard Ormond and the Yale University Press are compiling the complete works of John Singer Sargent and this volume, the sixth, is Venetian Figures and landscapes. It contains full color photographs of every painting done in Venice. The paintings are shown with contemporary views of Venetian piazzas and canals taken in 2005. It is gorgeous and the perfect guide for planning and imagining working at the sites frequented by Sargent. While comparing Sargent to Turner, I notice immediately the difference in point of view between the two artists. Turner views from afar and loves the vast distance of space. Sargent views from below, as if sitting in a gondola and looking up at the buildings bathed in his captivating light. Those two points of view will be the primary differences that we try to emulate while painting in Venice. It will be up to each of you to determine which speaks most to you of Venice.

In the meantime, good luck getting a peak at this book before fall. I’ve got it out until Aug 13th! E-mail me if you are eager to get a glimpse of it.

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!

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

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