Pessimism aside, the weekend in Venice has given me a great deal to digest, both gastronomically and mentally. Though I feel like the our experience in Venice has been defined by the eternal search for affordable food, I'm also at a loss of words to describe the experiences along the way to our overpriced pastas. I feel like I'm living in a black-and-white film right now, so colorful were the Venetian streets and people. The contrast of a 3-foot wide "street" to the enormous space of Piazza San Marco (the only landmark anybody was capable of finding, because Venetian streets defy map-reading abilities). The toddlers dressed up as pandas and ducklings, passed out in strollers by the day's end. The "Free Willy" music (as Monica dubbed it) that boomed out over Piazza Roma and through the streets. The smell of seaweed and the sound of shifting water. The constant sound of glass bottles being kicked through the streets, over voices in a dozen languages.
And yes, despite the overwhelming stimuli that crowded all five senses, I still feel as if I'm coming up a bit short in class. After meeting with Jana, I realized that I'd been pushing myself in directions contrary to my artistic interests, and that going with what I'm comfortable with is no bad thing. I think I'm going to continue playing with making gestural ink paintings of the different Annunciations—in addition to the idea of gesture and human interaction in this subject matter, I also got interested in the contrast between the stiffness of early painting and the movement in a quick ink wash. What I'm doing, in the most general sense is taking an ornate painting, wrought with detail and weeks of labor, and reducing (or elevating?) it to a gestural rendition of dark/light, created in minutes on a flimsy piece of paper.
As midterms draw even nearer, I hope that sticking to this idea and exploring its potential will yield some sort of result before I find my head on the chopper. Hopefully it won't degenerate into a frantic search for "something, anything," because it freaking sucks to be committed to an art project you're not actually interested in. Fingers crossed....
....and photos uploaded.
ps. In an effort to relate the title of the blogpost to the actual blogpost, I will mention that wearing a backless dress and light jacket in February, in a city on the ocean, is Bad News Bears.
