I’ve updated the syllabus, assignments, and itinerary pages on the site, so if you’re contemplating joining us in Spring 2013, please take a look!

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.

You may not register for ART/COMM 285: Imagining Venice without an instructor’s approval. If you haven’t picked up an application form from Study Abroad already, be certain to do it now: fill it in and get a faculty member’s recommendation sent back to the office by Nov. 29.

Terry and I will be choosing about 14 to 16 students from the applicant pool.

If you’d like more information about the trip before you make a decision, please come see us at the Imagining Venice information session in the Nelson Room (behind the Study Abroad office, on the parking-lot side of the building). We’ll be there tomorrow — Tuesday — 11/9 at 4:30 p.m. to answer questions. Much of the information we expect to go over is already here on the website, but this will be a chance to ask anything we haven’t covered already.    If your parents are local and want to drop by to ask questions, that’s fine with us, as well!

In preparation for our course in the spring, Dr. Dru and I need to brush up on our Italian. She needs brushing up; I need to completely remodel my language skills. So to that end, I am going to try something different at Friday Open Studio. We will be painting and learning Italian at the same time. I think we will have about an hour of Italian beginning at 3:30. Before that, I will be available for artistic commentary and watercolor skill building. Open Studio is open to anyone and if you are interested in coming to Venice, you should drop in to learn some of the language. Open Studio is held on Friday afternoons from 2-5 pm in my classroom B1. B1 is located next to the ceramic studio in the building to the west of the Ahmanson Science Center. Open Studio begins September 10th. Ci vediamo li!

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!

As you all happily return to classes this fall, you will be met with the visually-compelling, new poster for Imagining Venice. Let us know where the sightings are taking place. We hope to generate a lot of excitement for our course with our design. Christy Smolenski of the Study Abroad office helped put together the design of the poster. She put up with the two professor artists and their persnickety demands for visual perfection. We ended up with a great poster. The image is taken from four different art images: photograph, comic book style graphic, watercolor, and oil painting. This is the view from the Dogana, or customs house, at the entrance to the Grand Canal opposite St. Mark’s. We look out toward the east to San Giorgio Maggiore. This is an iconic view of Venice, to be sure, and has been depicted by centuries of artists. Will you add to the visual conversation that we intend to present in class and in person from this exact spot?

The image uses a photograph from Paolo de Faveri, a comic style gondola by me and a watercolor by me, connected to an oil painting by Joseph William Mallory Turner. With the poster, we hope to communicate the variety of possibilities for the images of Venice. We also intend to imply that individual artistic responses to the city are numerous and that your voice can be added to what some think of as a visual din. This class is a pilgrimage to a place that has been so ingrained in our consciousness that some will say that it is not necessary to even go there to learn anything new. Dr. Dru and I say that the very act of traveling informs your life in profound ways and that no matter how many times you see an image of Venice, it is not the same as being there. Join us and find out for yourself. Imagine Venice and you!

PS. You can see more of Paolo’s photographs at his website listed on our blogroll.

I walked into our brand-new Swenson Center for the Social & Behavioral Sciences here at California Lutheran and saw our travel seminar poster standing in the lobby!  Yay! It feels great to see this trip slowly coming to life.

This fall we’ll be recruiting students for the course, and in spring we start the actual coursework. If you are thinking about going on the seminar, keep in mind that we’re looking for very responsible, mature students.  We want students who will get up and out of the palazzo on time for early-morning painting sessions, who can be trusted to do their “homework” (journaling, art, museum hunts) during the day when they’re left on their own, and who will show up sober and ready to participate in our evening discussions and/or excursions.  So come introduce yourself to us sometime this semester, and think about which professors or university staff members will vouch for your reliability when you apply for the class!

When Terry and I were working out the syllabus for spring’s class, we checked the local museums for their upcoming exhibit schedule. LACMA’s  Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915 was one of the exhibits that seemed relevant, since 18th and 19th century Venice are often popularly depicted in film and literature. The Los Angeles Times just published a blurb about the exhibit that shows off two gorgeously ornate men’s jackets. It also notes that the exhibit seems to have been pushed back a month; when we’d first created the syllabus, LACMA had it listed as opening in September; now it seems to be opening in October.

Either way, I encourage students to go; it will be open until April 3, so students taking our class will have ample opportunity to attend during the spring semester and earn some extra credit. I certainly intend to go, probably well before spring; I adore 18th and 19th-century fashion! One of the museums in Venice that we won’t be requiring students to visit, although I found it fascinating and hope some students may end up there on their own, is Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo, a study center for the history of costumes and textiles. It’s a small museum on only one floor of the palazzo but displays several sumptuous Venetian outfits as well as the furniture and decor of the time. Tucked in a rather obscure corner of the city, Palazzo Mocenigo doesn’t get much traffic, but I loved it and its catalog has managed to survive all of my decluttering purges over the last four years!

Photo credit: Man’s jacket, circa 1750-75, Palazzo Mocenigo

Terry and I met for several hours yesterday to go over the Venice itinerary day by day, checking museum and church hours; going over plane, train and vaporetto schedules; and trying to reach a happy balance between requiring students to complete their assignments each day and permitting them sufficient free time to do whatever shopping or exploring they’d like to do on their own. I think it’ll work out pretty well, although getting everyone up for a dawn painting session at Saint Mark’s square may be a challenge!

One of biggest changes we’ll be making at this point is turning the trip to Vicenza into a day trip instead of an overnight trip. We want to visit Palladio’s buildings there, including his famous Villa Almerico-Capra, “La Rotunda.” However, La Rotunda is only open on Wednesdays, and the day our visit had fallen on under the old schedule would have been a Thursday. Moreover, Terry discovered that getting from Vicenza to Florence is something of a public transportation pain in the neck, compared to getting from Venice to Florence.

So, we’ve shifted the Vicenza trip back a day and we’ll plan to return to Venice that night. I think that’ll work out much better for us in the long run. We’ve also made a number of other changes, including plugging in real dates. We’ll post a revised-but-still-tentative itinerary later this month, after we’ve given it another look-through.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks to a very generous husband, I have joined Dru’s iPad for travelers club. So one of first things that I did was to put Imagining Venice on my desktop and go to the google mapping app to view the city. IPad has a “you are here button”, so all we have to do when lost among the canals of Venice is to hit the button and we are found! Well maybe-we’ll have to be able to get to a place that is not blocking the signal. Good luck with that! I have a really good sense of direction. We’ll have to rely on that and the flow of tourists to help us find our way. So the iPad and WordPress will work as blogging tools. Now I just have to figure out the editing process in iPad.