Now this post (and any post in general) is long long overdue. So I'm putting it out there that just the act of going to art school and not a liberal arts school is a study abroad experience in itself. This might be taking more getting use to than even living in another country. School is such a system, and changing this system definitely throws a monkey wrench into the works, if you know what I mean. (man, that sentence was fun). Anyway, where to begin, where to begin...
So I suppose I'll start with what my classes have been like? I'm in the 2nd year of the Painting and Printmaking Department. GSA (Glasgow School of Art) is different from Penn in that everyone in the same year in the same department does the same thing. My year is split into four groups, and each group goes through a rotation of three activities, each activity lasting for two weeks. My schedule is two weeks of life (figure) drawing classes, two weeks of studio time, two weeks of printmaking. So this week was my second week of my life drawing rotation. Which leads us to....the description of my life drawing class:
I love love love figure drawing. Like a lot. I've taken Figure Drawing I at Penn, and I loved that, so I was really excited to have my group start off in the life room. For one thing, GSA is very unstructured and independent, and I think the life drawing is probably the most structured thing that I'm going to do, so it's been nice to ease me into classes here. Anyway, here's how my time in the life room works: I have class in the life room Monday through Wednesday, from 9:30 to 4, with a 30 minute break from 11:00 to 11:30, lunch break from 12:30 to 1:30, and a small break from 3:00 to 3:15. So I've basically been drawing all day long. It's wondddeeerrfulll. We start off with really short poses, maybe six 2 or 5 minute poses, and as the day progresses, the poses get longer and longer. Usually before lunch the poses aren't much longer than 10 minutes, then after lunch we have longer ones ranging from 15 to 45 minutes. I get to work in any medium that I want, so I've been ranging from compressed charcoal to pastel to charcoal powder and water to pen and sharpie. I've actually been doing a lot of pen drawing here. It's pretty liberating--to explain, drawing with pen can be daunting because there's no way to erase... but I've really been getting into it. I'll put up some of my work as soon as I find my camera cord.
Anyway, that's all for now, I'm losing steam. Art school is awesome.
