Trees Part 2

It's been quite a few months. I've been on hiatus, but now I'm beginning to come back to life.

My last post was part of a study I did on trees for my final painting project. I figured I would reintroduce myself to life by showing what I came up with. Each painting is 3ft x 4ft and involved a lot of trial and error. With each one I learned something new about how to paint trees and wanted to follow different color schemes.

Since then, I've started a few more trees and have expanded on my original ideas. I am more or less creating a forest in my room and I couldn't be happier about it. There's always a new way to look a trees and I am discovering new ways to represent them all the time.

Trees

I went to Maine the first weekend of April and took a lot of photos doing studies of trees for my painting final. These were some of my favorites and I now wake up to the top two every morning.

It's Paper Time Again

I am taking a class where the ultimate goal is to write an 8 to 10 page research paper by the end of the semester and the first rough draft is due tomorrow. I don't mind writing research papers, but it has been a while since I've had to write one and I'm having difficulty organizing my thoughts without being repetitive and overly flowery. I read this article a while ago (I don't even remember where now) about how some people think that the bad economy will generate some sort of "artistic Renaissance" and weed out all the overly commercial art. The theory is that if there aren't as many patrons for artists, they will start focusing on what they want to do and their own ideas, as opposed to making things for other people. I found it very interesting because if you think about it, this is not the first time that this has happened in the history of art One of the first examples that comes to mind (mainly because of Italian Cinema last semester) is Neorealism in Italian Cinema. It appeared after the WWII and introduced the style of filming on location and often using non professional actors. It captured life in a war torn country and its devastation.

I've been researching lately and I feel my topic is going even further than the development of a new artistic movement. There are quite a few news articles about how the economic crisis is hitting the art world pretty hard and the unemployment rate of artists "is twice that of other professional groups," according to Agnes Gund the President Emerita and Chairman of the International Council of MoMA. Lots of articles talk about how during the Depression the WPA generated created a lot of jobs for artists and they are wondering why something like that cannot be instituted today. More or less it has broadened my focus to different aspects of the situation and I'm actually enjoying doing the research since it is an extremely current and relevant issue, especially as an art student.

I know exactly what I want to talk about, but I'm having a hard time finishing the ideas I have because there isn't really aren't any conclusions to come to except that we will have to wait and see what happens. Nonetheless, it should be interesting enough to write.

From Rome Open City (Rome Citta Aperta) by Roberto Rossellini

My Life as an Old Woman

I've been in all sorts of strange moods lately. Well, that's a bit of an understatement. I haven't really had any moods until yesterday when the only thing on my mind finally wasn't pain. But first thing is first, my back is a hot mess. Last Tuesday I couldn't take the pain anymore, so I broke down and decided to go to the ER. Nothing came up on the x-rays, so they told me to see an Orthopedic, shot me with a pain killer, gave me a prescription for pain killers, and sent me on my merry way. I decided I wouldn't go back to school until I saw the doctor and had an MRI--Wednesday was a snow day and Thursday I couldn't get any appointments (as usual). Friday was finally the day I had an MRI and it seemed that each day my mobility was decreasing even with the aid of a muscle relaxant and pain killer cocktail.

Fast forward to Sunday. I could barely walk. Standing was no longer my comfort position and trying to lie down was like problem solving. I literally spent five minutes trying to bend over and get something out of my backpack, when finally I went into Chelsea's room, woke her up, and asked her to get my backpack for me. I was expecting to make my way back to classes Monday, but around 10:00PM I went to stand up and I had the worse spasm ever. I started bawling my eyes out in pain and called my mom (the only plausible solution at the time) and she picked me up from New Brunswick. Since then, I have been camping out on the couch with the dogs, because I couldn't handle the extra flight of stairs and to be honest the rest has been helping. Yesterday I started sitting down for longer than 5 minutes at a time and getting up from lying down is much easier. However, there's still pain, I'm slow, and I have to remember to stand up from my seated position often.

And my MRI results were in yesterday. I have bulging discs, which are causing the pain in my legs and my solutions are physical therapy, or an epidural in my spine. I am opting for the PT before anything crazy. I was so afraid that I might need surgery because if this is what bulging discs feel like, I can't imagine the pain an actual slipped disc might cause.

In a sense, I deserve this. My back has been hurting me since before I left Italy and when I came home, but still I pushed myself and I have been pushing myself ever since and ignoring the pain, because generally it eventually goes away. Now, I have to live like a recovering injured person--no working out for now, no climbing, no lifting, and lots of rest. So I am probably also going to stop working nights at the rock wall, because after a day of classes, I'm going to need to vegetate and I'm going to have to make time for PT.

Now that I finally have a moment to myself to think and to rest and more importantly time that isn't occupied by the searing image of pain, I absolutely hate it. The reason I was so busy in the first place was to divert my attention away from anything feelings or thoughts that might be trapped in my head and now it seems like they're all coming at me full force.

I suppose this is my queue to start over and do things right.
But I can't help asking: when will things start looking up?

I'm a Sucker for Windows

I love nice lighting and big windows, which was basically an attribute that all of Europe had. I decided to start compiling a series of photographs based on different windows. These are a few that I liked. The top two are the Guinness factory and the bottom two are from the Baptistery and the Camposanto Monumentale (Cemetery).

Finally Home

I should have arrived home on Saturday the 19th, but on Friday night it decided to snow in Florence for the first time in about 10 years or so...

The Ponte Vecchio is somewhere in the background

On our way to Friends Pub for one last time.

A snow covered Duomo

The view from the terrace.

The view on the train to Rome.

It was definitely gorgeous and the experience of a lifetime to see snow in Florence, as well as have the opportunity to have a snowball fight and annoy all the Italians, but it ended up being hell the next day when it was time to leave. There wasn't actually a lot of snow, but the next morning when I went to catch my 7am train to Rome, there were already delays of up to an hour and eventually my train was even canceled. Unfortunately for me, it hadn't snowed in Rome and there were no delays flying out of there, so when I finally did catch a train from Florence it was about 9:30pm and I didn't make it to the airport until about 12:30...my flight was at 12:15.

And here's where the bitterness really kicked in.
I had no cell phone, barely any cash (because I expected the most money I would need was when I arrived home), and had to buy an entire new flight more or less. Since I hadn't missed my connecting flight in Dublin, technically, I could call the airline pay a penalty fee and buy another ticket for the difference, which is what I did, however I couldn't get a flight until Monday and the price was still astronomical. It was almost what I had paid for my round trip flight.

Luckily, I didn't get stuck at the airport for 2 days... I actually ended up in Gaeta, which is a whole other story within itself.

The Season is Ending

Real World Firenze is slowly coming to a close. Not that I really watch the show, but I feel that it's almost impossible to not at least have the gist of what it's about. Regardless I think I have been educated enough about it after reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman, who says:

"I tend to consider myself an amateur Real World scholar. I say "amateur because I've done no actual university study on this subject, but I still say "scholar" because I've stopped watching the show as entertainment."

And with that said, although my housemates and I are eight people and not seven (arguably seven at some points), we were certainly strangers thrown into a house of the proper Real World age and social demographic, except in a foreign country where none of us can speak the language and to study. All that's missing is a confessional booth, but we've certainly had the drama, conflicts, interactions, and absolutely random experiences to probably be just as interesting to watch as a season of the actual show.

We had always joked about this in the house and we still do from time to time, but as the days wind down, I find myself in more of a contemplative mood and trying to summarize everything that has happened in the past 4 months, or give my last "confessional." I came to a pretty big realization about my time here last night and as I was talking to Julia today about it, one of her only responses was that my experience really was like the Real World and that was my last time in the confessional booth and more so that is what this entire week will be (with a few finals and last minute sight seeing in between).

It really isn't going to hit me until I am stepping off the plane in JFK on Saturday. So much has happened, yet nothing has really happened at all.


I will leave it at this.

The one creative thing I have done here other than write and take photographs:

(I'm surprised I still know how to even draw at this point.)