Studio Art

It’s been three years since I’ve taken an art class…so, when there was an opportunity to take one here in ITALY I took it! This has become one of my favorite classes and I quickly realized how much I missed making art. We meet once a week for a couple of hours. Our teacher, Ferdinando, doesn’t know much English, but with the little bit he knows and the little bit we know of Italian, it works! The class started out with doing sketches. We went through more classic styles and ended the semester with contemporary art. We were studying frescos and got to paint landscapes with eggs and natural pigment. (We used coal for black). A few weeks ago we painted to music for contemporary pieces.

Some of my favorite classes are when we traveled around different parts of Viterbo to sketch or paint. Near the large open area of Piazza del Commune is a palace with many rooms of frescos that tell the stories of Viterbo and this area. I sketched faces of the people in the paintings here. We also made water color paintings in a park near the walls and sketched buildings that date back to medieval times.

Ferdinando is such a great teacher and his broken English just makes the class so much more fun! He invited our class out to dinner our last week here.