Art Experience in Italy Crew!
Posted by jimcorey on November 11, 2008
This email was sent out yesterday to people who supported a group of talented artists experiencing Down Syndrome (Lupita Cano of Seattle, Clara Link of Tacoma, and Dylan Kuehl of Olympia) which traveled to Italy October 27-November 3, 2008 for the art experience of a lifetime.Â
“The Art Experience in Italy crew thanks you!
Our group, with your support, had a personally and professionally poignant experience in Italy. We flew to Rome and traveled extremely well together. We had a lovely welcome dinner in Rome that first evening, and slept well. The next day, on an adventure to see the Pantheon, we were sidetracked by a 1.5 million student demonstration protesting recent cuts in education funding, which shut down Rome, but not us! We still made our train to Orvieto.
Once in the countryside, Luigi showed up with our van, and we traveled (me driving!) through the winding roads of the Italian countryside to Civita di Bagnoregio. We were welcomed to the town with open arms and a dinner cooked over a wood fire in a 3000 year old grotto/cave/restaurant by Maria and Sandro. Tony Costa Heywood our host joined us in the fantastic meal. The rest of our week consisted of grocery shopping in Bagnoregio at the butcher, the pasta maker (they made ravioli especially for us!), the bread maker, the fruit and veggie shop, and all the other old-town shops. We cooked and ate together in our houses in Civita, and ventured out to Orvieto and Todi for art and sightseeing experiences in the van.
The weather was volatile the night we arrived in Civita, a wicked but exciting lighting and thunderstorm passed over the town. We had fog, rain, hail, and ample sunlight overall. We experienced the many different moods of old Italy.Personally, we all experienced what it means to be artists in a land which celebrates its artists. Many conversations went long into the night, and during our meals together we forged a new understanding of what it means to support each other in our artistic pursuits. Everyone realized the importance of art in public experience, and we are all now even more fully dedicated to inspiring and supporting not only ourselves but others in the pursuit of exploration and self-expression!
We will be digesting the experience and creating new art in the next several months. We will be producing a video, a short book, and public presentations to share with you the poignancy of the experience. Stay tuned…
Mark Snodgrass said
Hey Jim! Great picture! Looks like a good time was had by all. I look forward to seeing how you all reflect your experience in all your artistic ways! Please make sure that Dylan, Clara, and Lupita all know that they can post to this blog, including artwork, prose and pictures.
Tim Foster said
Jim and all:
Sounds like a fantastic trip and would be great to see more pictures if they are anything like the one here. What was everyone’s favorite part of the trip? Thanks, Tim
Terri Rose said
Hello everyone,
Thought I’d make my first blog entry. WOW! This is great that people are able to comment about the trip. I am one of the parents that accompanied the three amazing artists to Italy.
What I am most happy about is that my son, Dylan has a new artistic interest in his life. He took a fond liking to photography. Art and beauty was everywhere we looked. He saw potential for new paintings around every corner.
He also took an interest in the language. Ordering his meals in Italian and even spoke to some pretty Italian girls on our way to Orvieto.
Dylan has begun painting his “Italy Series”. The first piece is finished, titled, “Civita di Bagnoregio”. His next work will be hard pastel paintings of
2 1/2″ x 2 1/2″ miniatures.
His art director called me with excitement while he was still in session with her, to tell me that “he gets it!” She said that he’s drawing from the right side of his brain. YEAH! I can hardly wait to see his new pieces.
She once told me before we left that a trip to Italy will help make him a “real artist”. I think it happened. He is excited and feeling confident in his art abilities.
I can still hear Dylan while we were walking the streets of ORVIETO. “Look at that, look at that, look at that! There are so many things I could paint”. He’s seen the beauty of Europe and is now ready to paint it for all of us to see.
Thank you everyone for helping make this trip happen.