Days 22, 23, 24 (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday)

            Monday morning was gorgeous.  I ran to the fun grocery store in the town down the mountain from Cortona and stocked up on some very red peppers, pink lady apples, cute little mushrooms and grape tomatoes, among some other delicious things.  And, just so you are aware, I did not run back up the mountain to Cortona carrying all my bags of produce, because that would be just crazy.  I power walked up the mountain instead.  With all my amazing vegetables, I decided to make a colorful soup for my lunches this week.  It ended up being quite beautiful, complete with spinach, broccoli, carrots, and the veggies I just bought.  That afternoon in my painting class I covered a lot of the canvas.  My self portrait, which is much bigger than life size, is turning out very loose and gestural, and with an interesting color palette.  At first I wanted to revert back to my traditional pinks and purples that I always love to use, but my professor challenged me not to.  So, I am adding lots of blues and browns and yellows, but my purple is still there. 

Tuesday morning was quite wet and rainy.  In my art ed class, we began lesson planning.  We are teaching in pairs.  Although I am not overjoyed with who I was assigned to teach with (hopefully she is not reading this blog) I still am overjoyed to work with Cortona’s third graders in a few weeks, and she actually had some good ideas.  We are basing our lesson plans off of the theme of community.  In paper/book making, we started working with pigmented pulps to make colored paper.  We each made stencils for pulp painting, which is when you essentially paint with colored pulp onto your paper.  (Pulp is the soaked fibers that are pressed into a sheet of paper).  I of course made a pepper stencil, and I then made a purple dye to make purple pepper paper.  How could I not?  After dinner that evening we had our second faculty presentation, where two of our professors give a presentation about their lives and artwork.  The first presentation (the week prior), Chris, the ceramics professor, and Rick, the director of the program, gave their presentations.  Tonight, the presentations were by Rebecca, the printmaking professor, and Preeti, the photography professor.  I am fascinated by Rebecca’s life.  When she was a grad student she also studied in the Cortona art program.  She ended up falling in love with a local Italian, and ended up marrying him and moving to Cortona!  She has lived here for nine years now, and has two daughters in middle school (they sometimes eat dinner with us; they speak both English and Italian fluently).  I am just amazed about how her life completely changed from coming to study here for a semester. 

That night, while falling asleep, we had our first thunder storm, which was actually quite violent sounding, with lots of lightning.  The storm felt somewhat out of place, experiencing it from Cortona, because I have always associated thunderstorms with being cooped up at home on the couch or in my bed huddled under blankets.  I guess I did not realize that thunderstorms exist in Italy too. 

            Wednesday morning, I went on my longest run yet, exploring yet even more of the Italian wilderness around me.  There was one strange moment on the run, where I turned the corner, and all of a sudden there was a sheep that I literally almost ran into.  I do not know what it was doing there all by itself…My Wednesday schedule is pretty open, because the only class I have that day is art history, but it is not until 5:00 p.m.  I would have wanted to wander around all day, but I had to finish up my Leaning Tower of Pisa paper.  It is difficult to fill up ten pages about it.