shorts and snow

I walked outside in shorts today, still a little cool with piles of snow still not melted, but it's finally sunny...so different from the snow storm a couple days ago. I hope that was the end of the crazy weather. There were people playing in the snow on the terrace right outside of my room. I just took a picture from the inside haha, my suede boots and pea coat aren't quite snowball fighting gear. I think this is from Wednesday:



We went to Orvieto yesterday. There's a big cathedral with green and white encrustation all over except the Gothic facade, with TONS of detail, I can't imagine doing that.





The bronze doors were made recently, by a guy named Emilio Greco (not El Greco haha). There was a little museum dedicated to him full of his drawings and sculptures, as well as the process of making the doors. Since I've been paying attention to varying brushstrokes in painting it was interesting to see that even sculptors vary their strokes. I'm leaving some of the gesso background in the painting I'm working on now, and noticed that on some of Greco's sculptures he left bronze in small chunks just as is without making them smooth or putting some kind of mark in them. I like to see how different media overlap. At school I'm usually around drawing/painting people because of classes but I talk to people outside of my niche here including English majors. I didn't expect it at all but the process of writing can be really similar to making "art" like having a notebook to put phrases in like sketches in a sketchbook, writing, rewriting, editing, drawing, erasing, deciding when it's finished...
Art history is much better in person. We read about different monasteries and I saw a structure from Orvieto that I previously would have called something like a castle, but I recognized it as a monastery because of its location and design. I'm learning!

I didn't write last week because I was doing a lot of makeup work, but I'm caught up now so I'm back on the normal schedule. We're having midterm grades already, the semester is flying by!
Our semester exhibition is April 17th, wow that's soon.

On Friday night I went out at night for the first time in several weeks. Our whole group went to a show at the theater to hear Orchestra della Toscana and a British singer perform Broadway songs. After that we went to the pub and a few of us watched a local band in the back room play songs we mostly didn't recognize. Afterwards we met two of them, twins from Cortona. They were hilarious and kept a safe distance so that was a fun night. It was refreshing to meet people that weren't creepy looking like they're on the prowl for American girls. But we'll still be careful just in case :)