Crazy last couple of days. I feel like a "real" arts student.
Yesterday:
- Had a Hadassah meeting for my volunteer position at the hospital. It was weird because it was three Bezalel students interviewed at once. I think I did well, and was able to fill out all the forms that were in Hebrew.
- Went straight to painting class with Talia Israeli. Here's her website: http://www.taliaisraeli.com/home.html
It was comforting to see many familiar faces from my Masa program in class with me. Our course this semester is focused upon "The Accident". She talked about how art affects the order of things. Our job as artists is to access people and to shift our environment. She then pulled up a half hour clip of the World Trade Center burning to the ground, and said that some call call this tragedy, art. It was as if she was saying 9/11 was an accident, which it truly wasn't. A girl from my program started crying. It was incredibly awkward.
She did say some pretty poignant things. She related the video's emotional impact to how we are able to affect someone even if we are not physically with them, and said a bunch of other things I couldn't hear because I was chewing loudly on Corn Nuts.
I have to buy canvas, wood for making frames, oil paints, brushes, a palette, and other stuff. Now I know why they're called starving artists.
I ran from painting at 5 to get to ulpan by 5:30 (I was 15 minutes late)
Morah Kati was up to her usual tricks. We are actually moving fast and got up to telling time. My friends ditched the second half, though, so I was alone for most of it.
I went to the bathroom after ulpan and accidently splashed water on my phone while washing my hands. I was on the bus and realized none of the buttons were working. I said to myself: This is my second broken phone. Either the phones in Israel are crappy, or you are crappy to the phones in Israel. Thankfully, I had bought rice at the shuk last week, and I remembered reading that if you soak you phone in rice, the grains act as a desiccant similar to silica gel, and the water is absorbed. The phone rice reminded me of how much i wanted real, edible rice, so I boiled some. It was my first successful attempt at making a fluffy, wholesome basmati.
After that I sketched and watched way too much "Food Party". It's this amazing show in which this quirky Vietnamese girl cooks with love and potato dandruff and ostrich eggs with her puppet friends. She also has a blog which I read a lot. http://foodparty.tv/
Today was packed with all things art. I had street photography (in the middle of Bezalel Street) with a man who looks like a combination of Woody Allen and my 6th grade teacher. He wore a pink scrunchie in his ponytail. I really enjoyed his lecture, which was mostly impromptu because the slide projector broke. Some notes I took in my journal about what he said:
- Arnold Newman
- Robert Frank "The Americans"
- Goal of class is to meet/explore jerusalem
- a photograph is recognition. The subject becomes special.
- don't copy what we know. We are not here to take good pictures. We must explore what we don't know.
- the way the photographer sees is through his subject
- Three objectives: Honesty, Understanding, Passion
- we give ourselves our own grades. We evaluate ourselves based on the goals we set. He can mark them up 5 points or down 5 points. Passing=60
We can use whatever camera we choose. We don't even have to take pictures. It is however we choose to make observations.
Overall, I am really hyped for this class.
I had an hour to make it back to the main Bezalel campus. The fastest way was to take a bus. While on the bus I met a couple. I journaled it. Here's the excerpt:
"1:36 Thursday Oct, 21, Number 19 Bus
Just met an older couple from Seattle whose daughter is taking a gap year before going to Brandeis. She is studying at Hebrew U and is living in the same dorms I am. Is it a small world or is every Jew at Brandeis on a gap year in Israel? The dad was kind of a jerk. One of the first things he said to me was 'my daughter has the same water bottle. That's so interesting" I wanted to be like...no it isn't. He also said "let my wife take a picture of us so that it'll look like I picked up a younger woman in Israel (wink, pinch on the arm)". Eww. I'm basically your daughter. Don't say those things to me. They did get my picture, and my name, and email. I hope it's not some scam and I'm going to get robbed in the middle of the night."
I arrived at painting class and immediately introduced myself to two israeli girls next to me (This was the problem I had in ceramics class...i wanted to be upfront here). They were really nice and let me borrow their pencils and paper for sketching.
My drawing teacher, Pesach Slabosky is left handed.
Because that's the only hand he has.
He's slumped over and has the longest ear hair I have ever seen. His voice sounds like Julia Child. I didn't laugh at him. I chuckled (to myself) at the situation I had found myself in. Here I am studying art in Israel. It sounds so romantic. And my drawing teacher is a one-armed greasy old man from Brooklyn (actually an impressive artist...Columbia Grad, Brooklyn School of Art http://www.givonartgallery.com/artistPage.asp?aID=60). It was painful watching him assemble a still life of desks and chairs piled on top of one another. It was even more horrified when he sharpened a pencil with a box cutter between his legs. I had to go to the Bezalel art store and buy various pencils of varying hardness and my own box cutter. As Pesach says, "Small pencils and big pencils have different possibilities. You have to know how to use them differently. It is good to have different pencils of different hardnesses in your box."
I love artistic sexual innuendoes.
He is American so he says he translates half his class from english into hebrew anyways. The materials for this class are much more basic: "just buy whatever you need to sketch and make art," he says, in an i'm-not-gonna-make-you-poor-from-buying-bourgeoisie-art-supplies tone.
Tomorrow I am going to Haifa with my friend Olivia. We are staying with her cousins in a Moshav. They are caterers, which means free, amazing food.
But for now, I will feast on Mad Men Season 4 Finale. According to mom, it is quite prolific.
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