Lois Hetland's Blog

I’m teaching two courses that are new to me this term — Curriculum Design and Artist Teacher Studio. Both are taught to advanced students who are student-teaching or interning in Community Centers. They’re exhausted. They’re also fantastic artists who’ve just completed a Capstone course in which they developed rich bodies of personal work. And now, they’re teaching, and we’re using the course to explore how one maintains an art practice while they’re busy using up all their creativity and passion to meet the needs of their students. Sound familiar? It’s the question every artist faces when teaching: How do you make art and teach at the same time?

It was a rough start. I’ve been teaching for 38 years, but never these courses. And I just returned from sabbatical, so my clutch was lurching as I tried to get in gear. Curriculum has gone smoothly enough — that’s my turf, and I’ve done it in so many different contexts, that this is just a new version of the game. But Artist Teacher Studio — that’s all new. I assigned myself this course so I’d force myself to maintain a making practice — something I’ve left behind for years and want to renew. I did a lot toward that during the sabbatical — setting up a studio space in my home, writing daily reflections — every single day — and keeping a sketchbook. I developed entry ideas for a number of artworks — a Claim Kit, a Vanquish Kit, a series of sculptures or puppets that are turning into animation (which I have to learn) about judgment and intuition. Some responses to India, in patterns and colors. Some drawings of places I visited. And now it’s time to realize them. Intake of breath.

That’s what I’ve never done — set a regular practice of making and producing works. I’ve done it in courses, and I’ve done it sporadically in vacations and periodically,  but I’ve never had a regular studio practice. And I want that. But it’s frightening. I have loud, clever voices that tell me I’m not good enough, I can’t get good enough, I suck. But I’m working through that — as Kathleen Marsh at Boston Arts Academy tells her students, “The only way is through.” So I’m working through it. Keep breathing, Lois.

Today, I had a breakthrough. I realized that I’m designing a studio curriculum for the Artist Teacher Studio class, and that’s an example of how to design curriculum for the Curriculum Class. It came to me as I noticed that my fountain pen — purchased in December for journaling ONLY, never to be taken from my desk — was running out of ink. It runs out about every three days, and I have a bottle in my desk drawer to fill it. But usually, up to now, I’ve written until the ink stopped flowing; then I realized I needed to fill it. Today, though, I recognized the decrease in flow that precedes the stopping of ink. I’m gaining intimacy with my pen — my artist tool.

It got me thinking about Develop Craft. Artists love their tools and materials. Maybe that’s one of the reasons so many art curricula focus on skill development? (It could be other things — more pernicious — like that’s the easiest thing to see.) But the teaching of skill development too often starts with HOW. And that’s not a generative starter. What is a starter is passion, the love, the INCLINATION to care about materials and tools and using them well to express an idea. We have to start with MEANING and then turn to tools and materials to help express it artfully. That pushes the need to learn — I MUST learn these skills (for example, animation, in my case) in order to make this work about this idea that’s so important to me.

So, yes, teach Develop Craft. Teach students HOW to use the materials and tools of the discipline they’re learning. But don’t start with HOW. Start with WHAT (which tools? which materials), which flows from WHY. What (a) tools and media do we need to (b) make the thing we need to make to (c) say what we need to say.

That’s when I realized why it’s so disquieting to see my students, when asked to come up with 9 Dispositions or Behaviors that they want to teach (monthly topics for a year), come up with so many materials-centric themes. Where’s the habit that they want their students walking out the doors with, infecting them inside and that now lives therein? Color relationships? Book binding? 3-point perspective? Why have they reverted to skills and media and drifted from idea and meaning?

I think it’s two-fold: (1) schools win (thanks for the phrase, John Crowe). They’re in schools and they’re seeing curriculum based on elements and principles. “They have to learn the rules to break them.” Well, I don’t think that’s good learning science — it just doesn’t take human psychology into perspective. So that’s one reason. The other is (2) they love materials and tools, because they’re artists. These are delicious to an artist — the way a pencil rolls across the tooth of the paper, resisting and floating. The way the sharpener cleans the blade and refines its edge, honing it to perfection. The way the corner sits in the design, snugging into the edge seamlessly. These are all moments of deep satisfaction, where the hand/body unites with the mind. But that’s not what the students experience in a skills-first curriculum. For them, it’s strangeness, otherness, and the fear and doubt associated with that.

What they need is befriending. They need to have a need for these tools and materials because there’s something they want to do. And then, as they recognize vaguely the beginnings of what they’re trying to do, they find a need for tools and materials, techniques and control. So, how do we set up curriculum to capture them?

A Befriending Curriculum

First, the teacher and student need to get to know the student. What drives him or her? What are her passions, fascinations, and perplexities? What catches his attention no matter what? What does she notice?

After that, it’s time to enter into conversation with these ideas in art. Who else is fascinated by these ideas? What are they doing with them? How are they addressing them? Through film? Sculpture? Painting? Paper-making? Design? These are the people the student needs to be in conversation with — the contemporary and historical artists, the peers, the local artist community.

Third, it’s time for the teacher to facilitate some budding friendships. Set up “play dates” with different artists, different peers, different materials and tools. These “play dates” are assignments that are open and exploratory — and low stakes. Like a cocktail party, or a speed date (thank you, John Crowe!), or a handling table, or making 50 mistakes (another John Crowe assignment), they’re a chance to meet a tool or material that we might want to befriend.

Fourth, it’s time to deepen selected friendships. To develop familiarity with the tools, material, or technique. But that’s motivated internally, not imposed from outside. We need tools and material and technique so we can say what we need to say, do what we need to do, and make what we need to make. John Crowe calls this “going steady.” But it could be joining a play group. Or a club. Whatever metaphor, it’s the time to push a commitment to something and gain skill through regular, socially facilitated experiences.

Fifth, it’s time to push the boundaries. If we’ve developed familiarity, now it’s time to develop intimacy. To go where you won’t go with just anyone — to take the tool or material or technique inside and own it as important, as part of you, as YOURS. That means lots of exploration and practice, lots of different contexts, so the student begins to intuit, to sense what the tool can do to support meaning and purpose–his meaning, her purpose. Lots of challenges with scaffolds to support the inquiry toward solutions. This phase means committing to a body of work, a pursuit, a product.

Sixth, the student has to go public with the work to bring it and his own process into conversation about it with other artists. Work has to be seen, and the artist needs to talk about it to the audience of other artists, family, and broader publics. What IS this work? Why is it important? Who does it speak with? Who needs it?

And at that point, it’s time to let the work go and start some new friendships. You can return to one from before and build it new. But you have to go to ground and begin again.

What a different model of developing craft from that we see in so many schools where skill-development is king and no one notices that the students don’t know what to do with them — they just do what the teacher says (or don’t) and let it be. A few will learn to use their skills for what they need to make, but many won’t. And our goal is to catch a lot of fish in our nets of purpose. To do that, we have to start with self-investigation of desires and needs, then exploration of possibilities, followed by play dates and deepening relationships to ideas through materials or actions. At least, that’s how I’m thinking of studio curriculum today. It feels like what artists DO — and isn’t that how we want to set up our “junior versions” so students can learn to play the whole game? (That metaphor is from Dave Perkins’ book, Whole Game Learning).

I’m just reading the document the NEA commissioned on assessment: Improving the Assessment of Student Learning in the Arts – State of the Field and Recommendations. It’s by Sharon A Herpin, Adrienne Washington, and Jian Li at WestEd — for none of whom are credentials listed in the document. Neither is a copyright, so though I believe it’s quite recent, there’s no way to tell. This is inexcusable in scholarship, and they should know better.

The story told in the Executive Summary is that, in 2005, NEA started requiring and looking at what applicants for grants said about their assessment practices, and they found that people weren’t differentiating  program evaluation and assessment of student learning. I’ve seen that commonly, too. So they commissioned WestEd to conduct this study to “examine current trends, promising techniques, and successful practices being used to assess student learning in the arts throughout the country, as well as identify potential areas in which arts assessment could be improved.” This is right-headed, in my view. They identified a field-need anecdotally and then got a reputable group to conduct an empirical study. So far, so good.

But the study didn’t find strong models of assessment, so the report switched gears. It describes what’s up now, what literature is good, and what the field needs to do to improve. Again, this sounds useful. But, as they go into the goals in the Executive Summary, I find my first quibble, and it’s a major one. These are what they list as the goals of the current study:

• Available resources, tools, and documentation related to the assessment of student learning in the arts
• Current experiences and practices in assessing student knowledge in the arts
• Current experiences and practices in assessing student skills in the arts
• Trends in locating and using assessment tools
• Needs of the field to improve the assessment of student learning in the arts

I’m down with bullets one, four, and five as goals. But do you notice anything that’s important to assess that’s missing? I do.

Bullet 2: Knowledge — ok. But there isn’t really a defined body of knowledge that constitutes what an artist needs to know. Art is the true interdisciplinary discipline — it claims as its content all the content and forms and methods of every discipline. Artists work on science, history, economics, literature, language, mathematics, politics, geography, philosophy, history, sustainability, social justice and equality, religion, anthropology — name it, there’s an artist who puts that at the center of her or his work. I was just at the Venice Biennale in October 2013, and the national pavilions and Gioni’s curated exhibition both made that abundantly clear. So just what knowledge are they planning to assess? I suspect — we’ll see as I read further — that it’s the history of art, the names of eras and artists and works, and the names and definitions of tools and media and approaches. Good, all good. But so inadequate, and not at ALL all or even essentially what an artist needs to know to practice effectively, or to understand and appreciate the archive of wisdom and intelligence represented by the works artists have created throughout time and place.

Bullet 3: Skills–ok. But, first, it’s not parallel to knowledge. Knowledge is a network of information organized systematically. It should be dense and organized for access so it can be used. But skills? Those are what people can do expertly, yes? My online dictionary says: “the ability to do something well; expertise : difficult work, taking great skill.
• a particular ability : the basic skills of cooking.” In what way is skill parallel to knowledge? It’s like comparing apples to a jet plane. What’s parallel to knowledge is Methods — that is, the processes by which experts build and validate knowledge. That’s a definition we use at Project Zero, defined when creating the Dimensions of Understanding in the early 1990s. Skills are part of methods, but methods is bigger; a deeper disciplinary structure.

And it’s THAT that we need to ensure students take away from their primary and secondary education–the deeper disciplinary structures of the disciplines, including the arts. We need to be educating for an appreciation of what art is (Knowledge and Forms), how it works and how it’s done (Methods), what counts as good (Methods), what it’s for (Purposes), and why it matters (Purposes). And by appreciation, I don’t mean merely knowing ABOUT. David Perkins has identified a common failing of education as participating in “about-itis.” No, we need more than learning ABOUT, and we need to demand more and, therefore, assess for more. We need students to be able to use what they know flexibly in novel circumstances. That’s the definition of understanding we use at Project Zero, the “performance view of understanding.” And it’s THAT that we need to be assessing in the arts (and in everything else).

There’s widely shared agreement in the field of assessment that, in order to assess well, you have to be assessing something you intend students to learn. The same is true of research — you need to interpret something you’ve stated as intended. So the research goals are critical to a study’s veracity and usefulness. In this case, the goals are inadequate, as I’ve discussed above. And that means that the field is now more confused but whatever’s been found (which I haven’t read yet). Rather than clarify what we really need, it seems the study has set out to state what is needed without considering what that really means. And, as we all know, “we get what we assess,” so if we’re not assessing what the field really is and is for, what are we doing?

We’re setting students and teachers and the educational system up to do Mickey-Mouse, which demeans the arts and wastes people’s time. It sets the arts up as trivial — and, as Gioni, the Curator of the New Museum in New York and of the 2013 Venice Biennale, states, “they are a matter of life and death. So that’s malpractice, because we, individually and as a society, desperately need arts education, and that means we desperately need arts assessment. If the assessment is skewed toward assessing something that isn’t really what art is, but, rather, assessing a parody or a flim-flam man of what art is, then the effort serves to derail the quality of arts education and future artistic practice and appreciation.

We have to get the categories right. If we find, as we do, that arts don’t have quality assessment (and I can’t believe that, given what I know to be the case at MassArt, where ongoing public critique, refinement, and culminating reviews and exhibitions are the norm and where we teach our students to carry out those practices in their arts classrooms when they teach), then it is likely because the field distrusts what’s being done in the name of assessment. So the first order, in my view, is to get clear about what we need to assess. Once that’s straight, we can see how it’s been assessed by experts in the field over time and in varied contexts, and how that’s evolving today. It’s THOSE practices that will show us the pathways to assessing student learning in the arts.

So let’s get on it!

Apologies for the radio silence this past week. I was afraid I’d be a bad blogger — unreliable, I mean. And it seems that’s the case. But let me try to give you an overview, and then I can try to fill in more details as the weeks unfold — we’ll be back Sunday! And then will all this feel like a dream?

After a day of recovery (and laundry — ai yi yi!) after our adventure in the Andamans, we flew north to Bhuj, a small city in the Kutch region (or Kachchh in the local dialect!) of the state of Gujarat in northwest India on the Pakistani border. An NGO there, the Khamir Foundation http://www.khamir.org/ is working “to reposition craft and folk music in Kachchh and to revitalize Kachchh’s creative industries.” They hosted us for five days, driving us around the city and local countryside to visit indigenous artisans in their homes and studios. I declared loudly at the start of the first day, “I’m not really in a acquisitive mood at this time in my life, so I hope I won’t offend anyone if I don’t buy their work.” Hah. 30,000 or so roupees later, I have an entirely new appreciation for Indian craft and aesthetic, along with a huge duffel bag of exquisite works.

Day 1: We flew from Bangalore to Mumbai and then onto Bhuj, where the Khamir car met us and took us to the Prince Hotel where we settled in. It was far more commodious than our camp accommodations in the Andamans, with air conditioning, bathrooms and internet in each room, and huge lovely beds. People were so kind and generous, and the food in north India is different and wonderful in an entirely new way from what we’ve been eating in the south. I love them both! We had dinner with Sushma, a high-level contact at Khamir, who oriented us to what we were going to see.

Arzu from Srishti, John, Lois, Arti from Khamir, and Padi from Srishti

Day 2: We visited two weavers and were treated to private conversations and tours of their studios and workshops. They weave in a local drought-resistant (indigenous) short-staple cotton, in local wools, merino wool, local silk, other long-staple Indian cottons, and combinations of these. They dye with natural colors, including indigo and many other vegetable dyes. The works are mainly varieties of shawls, but Shamji’s family has also won many awards since the 1970s for their designs. The looms are outside and in, and the complexity of the craft is phenomenal.

Shamji –Weaver with Father’s Award Winner from 1976

We had a fascinating conversation with Shamji about contemporary craft and its relationship to contemporary art and design. (insert photo) There is a complex ecology of ideas that I’ll write a separate post about, involving tradition, innovation, sustainability, creativity, family and community networks, and ongoing engagement, local, national, and global markets, and business/commerce. There’s also an IT element, since everyone has a smart phone and is constantly in touch with the rest of the world — these are no longer isolated communities, despite the dust, poverty, and cows, dogs, goats, and camels everywhere on the streets among the autos (three-wheeled open taxis), motorcycles, and cars. The most emblematic statement, “Everything that is true about India is also not true” is everywhere evident.

Day 3: We were introduced to block printing today, another fascinating process with gorgeous products.

Printing Blocks

Again we visited a master craftsperson, Dr. Ismail Khatri, who taught himself English to educate his many visitors and to learn more himself at a higher level (Shamji’s conversation with us was all through translation). We saw the dye pits, the printing studio, and the selling room, where we purchased liberally. I’ll put in some more photos later — right now, the interface is acting the fool.

Next we visited a young man of 20 who was a block-printer for Dr. Khatri, but the master insisted that the young man go to the local year-long design program to develop his creative skills. He is now working beyond the tradition and into expressive art, but he is ready for a deeper and broader art and design education. We’ll work on finding a way to support him coming to Srishti and/or MassArt for a term if we possibly can — it will require us to find some funds, but it’s entirely within a feasible range and would enrich us and him and the Kutch artisans in many ways. (Photos later I hope!)

Next we visited the Khamir center for lunch and another buying spree — bells, lacquerware, crafts made from plastic bags, and some beautiful embroidery. Then whoosh, off we went back to buy at Dr. Khatri’s, then to another NGO’s office that supported the embroiderers (more buying and a fascinating argument about the needs of contemporary craftspeople beyond the market/commerce solutions), and then out to dinner at a fancy hotel, outside overlooking Bhuj at night. Wooo.

Day 3: Today we saw non-textile crafts — bells, leather, mud-wall painting — and also Rogan textile painting. That is an amazing technique developed by one family who’ve won gazillions of awards internationally. The technique mixes castor oil with pigment to make a gooey paste, which the artisans put on the heel of one hand. Then with a pointed nail, they stretch a string up from the goo gob and lay it in intricate patterns onto the cloth. The framework of the design can be pressed symmetrically onto the other side of the cloth, and then the myriad details are built up, one line/dot/color at a time. They can take 3-6 months each, easily. I bought a “tree of life” with a peacock in the center. Exquisite stuff. Almost unbelievable.

The bell making process was also astonishing, and the bell-maker made a bell in front of us, start to finish. I own it! He cut the scrap metal, sized it carefully, curved it in a stone-hole template, pounded it on a small anvil stick in the dirt, made a top, rounded it, thinned the flanges of bell and top, attached them and pounded, and then off we went to the firing. There, the women pressed clay mixed with cotton fiber into a chapati-like patty, dipped the bell in clay slip and dusted it with copper and zinc, and rolled it into a little biscuit inside the clay. That went into the charcoal fire until the clay got red hot and was then removed to cool, doused with water. When black cool, he cracked the clay with a mallet, revealing the beautiful patina. Then off we went back to the workshop where he put on the clapper and tuned the bell — hammering the bottom and ringing it repeatedly until the overtones rang true and long. Astonishing. We bought a LOT of bells.

Then we drove up north, passing a camel caravan, to a wonderful lunch at a resort created by a village (you can stay there in the fabulous guest houses of mud craft with mud-painting on the walls), and then visited a leather-craftsman and his family. Leathercraft has been in decline, so they’re working on connecting them to designers and building an international market. His wife demonstrated mud painting for us, and we dressed Arzu up in the same kind of finery she wore daily — bangles on lower arms, white bangles stacked without gaps on her upper arms, mirrors and embroidery on her “apron” and a large gathered skirt and metallic-rimmed scarf. Glorious.

We headed to the white desert, where salt accumulates in the dry months to depths 4-6 inches and flamingo flocks pass through on migration. So barren and lovely, even in this pre-salt wetness following the monsoon, and no flamingos. We headed home stopping for a milk curd sweet by the side of the road.

Day 4: Our last day before flying home to Bangalore. We started at the Hunnashala Natural Builders, which is a brilliant architectural group using recycled, local, and natural materials and designs and working to develop local talent by employing youth in apprentice programs. Following that, we visited the bandini (tie-dye) cloth artists, who make phenomenal textiles with intricate dots tied (and paid) one dot at a time. I got a bag of the strings that come off after the dying and drying. Maybe they’ll end up in paper?

We had a thali lunch (20 inch plates and many small dishes) and headed for the airport — flying through Mumbai and then to Bangalore. It was truly an astonishing trip, and it’s clear that we’re just on the beginning edge of understanding the complexities of the lives and challenges of these artisans and their relationships to the international world. Everyone of them is on cell phones constantly, uses computers and the web, and sees visitors from all over the world. Some travel for residencies and exhibitions, and some have been subjects of documentaries and have won stacks of prizes. It’s not the isolated world of rural India that it used to be — but superficially, it has much of that veneer. The future is a dynamic process, and ensuring that it goes well for the artisans is a cause Khamir is dedicated to. I’m in awe.

Heading Out to Scuba Dive!

Today I dived on an Andaman Island coral reef. John wasn’t feeling well and stayed back at the camp, but our host, Arzu Mistry (photo center) and her colleague, Padmini Nagaraj (photo left), joined me for Padi’s and my first experience scuba diving! It was, well, incredible.

I adore water and will choose to be in it anytime, anywhere, any temperature, salt, fresh, pool, outside, lake, ocean, creek, river, inside, bathtub, you name it. But I’ve never scuba dived. I always assumed I would one day, but I came close to giving that dream up, worried that I’d passed my window for that kind of thing. When I got to the Andamans and met Arzu’s brother, Umeed, who is the Director of the diving program at ANET, we had a conversation. He was so calm and reassuring that diving was possible for me that even Padi, who doesn’t SWIM, was determined to go on a “Discovery” dive with him. Arzu has her Open Water Certificate and has dived many times, so we knew we were in great hands with caring friends.

We learned a couple things in the pool the day before — trying out breathing on the regulator, clearing our masks when water gets into them (which it did when Arzu accidentally slugged me while we were under!), retrieving our breathing regulator should it fall from our mouths, swimming with the flippers and tanks and the inflated life vests on, and so forth. But as they said, all this was “just in case,” and we didn’t really need to know much — the purpose of a Discovery dive is to introduce someone to the possibility of diving by showing them what it’s for without requiring much technical knowledge or preparation. I think that has great parallels to teaching — get the skill out of the way by scaffolding most of what they need to do the process while the student is getting hooked on the enterprise itself. Then bring the skills in, since they’ll understand what they’re for and tolerate any tediousness that comes up in learning them–and, of course, tediousness always comes up in learning new skills.

I went with Umeed first, slowly following Arzu down the descending rope of the boat’s anchor, holding Umeed’s hand and equalizing my ears every couple of feet down to 10 meters. Umeed is, as my friend Louise Music says, “the handsomest man in the world,” so holding his hand was no problem 🙂 But what really made it great is his calm assurance. There was no question in my mind that if I did exactly what this young man told me, I’d be fine and have a wonderful experience. And so I did.

Crocodile Fish

We saw a lot of the same fish and animals we’d seen while snorkeling, although there were new ones. The Christmas Tree worms were a gas — if you touch them they pull back into the coral. But in a few seconds, they pop out, blooming like a tiny jeweled flowers on time-lapse photography.

Christmas Tree Worms

But being down with air felt so different.  Snorkeling let me see the world below, but the scuba gear let me feel like I could live there and wasn’t just a voyeur. Add to that the buoyancy and ease of movement, plus hearing only your own breathing, and it makes the experience blissful on every level. I may be hooked.

Hello from below

I can hardly believe I’ll be able to tell everything that’s happened since I wrote last. But if my memory serves…

My blogging and need for a “bucket bath” meant we left late to go to the museum. Sarita (ANET staff) went with John and me to the anthropological museum. Oddly organized, it’s sort of a museum to the way museums used to be. But we still managed to learn a good deal about the original 5 tribes of the islands, though less about their contact history (that is, when they met outsiders). Afterwards, we had lunch at a wonderful resort overlooking the sea and then returned to the base, because my 3 am arising caught up with me. Maybe we’ll go to our other destinations, at least Cellular Jail (where the British put Indian political prisoners and criminals before Indian Independence in 1947) before we go to the airport today. Kids, especially boy kids, apparently are thoroughly engaged by that history and experience.

When we returned and after a nap, it was time to walk a nearby beach to examine the giant upturned tree roots from the tsunami for banded sea kraits–a venomous water snake who uses them to rest and nest.

Banded-sea-krait

We climbed in the back of the ANET truck and road across to the beach. The stars were astonishingly bright without much city light, and we toddled on down the beach, torches beaming into the air, along the sand to catch the ghost crabs scuttling to safety in the water from their munchings at the tide-line litter, and out into the water. The tsunami had a huge effect on these islands; the epicenter was southeast. Land sank and was permanently inundated with sea water, which killed trees, some of them giants. These roots –20 feet in diameter, some of them, lay on the beach like giant brooches, patterned by their intricate root systems. And into the crevices of these, we saw 7 banded sea kraits (Saul, I’m told you’d eat your heart out to see one of these creatures, as they’re so rare and herpetologists drool to see them). They were lovely — black and white bands and a wedge tail for swimming. They are venomous, but they have tiny mouths meant to kill in small holes in coral reefs, mainly, so there are almost no reported human deaths–possibly a fisherman who pulled one into a net and got bitten in the shallow skin between index finger and thumb.

The next morning, it was up early to snorkel. We drove into the Mahatma Gandhi National Seashore and took a boat to another boat with a shallower draw — the ANET boat that then took us to the reef.

Out to Snorkel on the ANET boat

We were in a beautiful turquoise cove, and I couldn’t wait to get in the water. They gave us fins, maskes, and snorkels, told us where we could swim, and I was off. One dip of my face-mask later, I was ensnared in the underwater world of the reef. A group of 12 or so giant hump-headed parrot fish — six or seven feet long — stayed with us for most of the morning. My video from my GoPro is pathetic, but I include it for those brave enough to risk a few seconds of their lives.

Hump-headed Parrot Fish

Luckily, Umeed Mistry, my host Arzu’s brother (perched in profile in the photo), is the Dive Instructor here as well as a fine photographer (he and Tasneem, who runs the center, just won a national award for nature photography!) also used my camera, so I’ll add a piece of his footage later.

I was lost in the world of the reef all morning, only surfacing to drink water and, finally, to eat some fruit on the beach with the others — John and Geetha had been “playing pebbles in the surf” while I blissed out on snorkeling. During one last foray, it started to rain — a wonderful sensation of being in one world and being tapped by the other to return. We returned to the dive center, showered, and came back to ANET to nap.

After dinner, about 8:30, one of the scientists, Bhanu, took me out to the mangroves for a night walk. It was at the limit of my trust, since I had no idea where we were. But she did, and we wandered through the sand and muck and roots to see dog-headed snakes, a white eel, and crabs crabs crabs.

Finally, to bed, exhausted, but ready for the new day, when I’d decided to scuba — a lifelong dream about to be fulfilled.

Night out my window at the Hotel Bel Sito, Venice

I arrived in Venice in the rain late last night. The vaporetto (water taxi) dropped me at the Giglio stop, and I wandered up the narrow alleyway toward what I hoped would be my hotel. It appeared. After checking in and making my way to a tiny room on the top floor (3rd), facing the street, I found to my delight that the windows and shutters opened. As the sounds and feel of the night rushed in,  I saw for the first time the spectacular church I had passed blindly on the way in, Santa Maria de Giglio, for which (I now know) the vaporetto stop is named.

I’ve just come from London, a Project Zero Conference, and where I’ve traveled before. It’s still largely unknown, though I’ve explored some in the central city. But I noticed that “landing” sense of awe and confusion the first night there, too — a wash of colors and forms, swimming in some miasma of disorientation and curiosity.

The Miasma Blur in London

Waking slowly this morning to lovely and unfamiliar sounds everywhere — church bells, right here and near and far distant; cart wheels and heels on cobblestones, rain and water dropping, a child singing, muffled voices speaking Italian, the iron lamp hanging from the ceiling in my room — I found my senses all behaving as if they were fingered hands, reaching out toward the smells, sounds, air, and tastes of breakfast (with impossibly yellow eggs).

They were almost orange.

Returning to my room, I started to journal at the lovely writing desk. Everything here seems to call for attention to an aesthetic experience. Is that Venice or my expectation of Italy? An interaction, surely.

A perfect place to collect thoughts in words.

Soon I leaned out the window into the city —  slowly discovering the life in the friezes and statues of the church below. I lingered on the angel with the book and staff, noticing the pigeon wires on his/her (gender ambiguous) head and arms, the fullness of his flesh, the subtle gaze down — in thought? Reading? Praying? The motion of her raised right knee, ornamented by time with rectangular cracking. How different from the night before! How familiar somehow, these new friends.

A New Friend

It isn’t just the difference between night and day viewing, nor the effects of the flatness in emerging from travel, though those have something to do with the bewildered fuzz. But the difference that seems most salient slapped me boldly — “learning about” art is entirely different from experiencing it. Being in situ makes it natural to befriend works, understand artists’ intentions and subtler nuance that evade me in a reproduction or class. I try hard there, to compensate, but maybe that furthers the difficulty of the relationship. Here, it’s not studying so much as befriending. On my first trip to Italy, my first to Venice, my first to a Biennale, I’m panting to make a whole new circle of friends in the works I’m about to meet. And I wonder — can we bring that sense of ease and delight into the classroom and studio? What a gift if we could.

Angel Herald at Santa Maria de Giglio in Daylight Rain