Sculpting Horses

Today was my first day of classes. I had to attend a meeting in the morning, which didn't go so well, but the rest of my day at SACI made up for it. The way it is now, I only have one class on Mondays which doesn't start until 1:15pm so I have plenty of time to sleep in (this will be nice if I travel on the weekends or even if I am just out late here in Florence). Anyway, the one class I had was sculpture, which is apparently different from ceramics, though there is some overlap. On the way to my class, I get to walk through the garden at SACI, which is pictured below.

The ceramics studio overlooks the garden, and part of it is even in the garden (but in a covered area in case there's rain). I can definitely get used to this!! Here's a shot of the sculpture studio:

My professor is extremely laid back and we have a lot of freedom within the class. Instead of going over the syllabus and leaving immediately after (like we do in the States), we stayed the full length of class and started working on our first project. Our professor, Dario ("like Mario but with a D" as he says) had many xeroxed sculptures that we could choose from to reproduce for our first project. Many of them were nude figures (of course, this is Italy) but I eventually found one of horses! 

For the first project, we will be using the additive strategy, which means we start with a huge piece of clay that has to be about an inch thick and then we keep adding or subtracting clay as needed until we get the result we like. Eventually, we will be casting the clay in plaster (and I think we may even paint it at some point, but we are talking about doing this in late January/early February). We haven't even had a week of class and already, our professor said we will be going on a sculpture field trip on Wednesday to see some of Michelangelo's early works! That's one of the things I love most about Italy: everything is right at your fingertips, especially when it comes to art. I hope to make it to the Uffizi soon to see all the works I learned about in Art of the Renaissance. 

Well, I have class early tomorrow so it's ciao for now!