Mucha

This week has been mostly painting with a few trips around the city thrown into class time. Continuing with our slight obsession with Alphonse Mucha, our class went to go see his series “Slav Epic” in the National Gallery. It consists of 20 HUGE paintings that depict the history of the Czech and Slavic people which he gave to the city of Prague upon its’ completion in 1928. I honestly wasn’t aware that these even existed, and it was a great surprise and shock to see how amazing the pieces were.

This week our class was also taken to one of Prague’s design schools. We were able to go through the students’ studios and see what kids our age have been doing here. It was really cool, and the building sort of reminded me of a taller version of our own design building.. except with less strict fire codes. It was awesome to be able to wander around though, they had some beautiful glass and pottery work, and I did really like the graphic design studio. I felt like a total nerd because of how good it felt to be surrounded by typography again.

As with my own designing, here’s an update on my paintings, i still have 3.2 more to do for Thursday and then I’m DONE with classes! This series is supposed to be our reflection or Prague, and the pieces themselves need to each incorporate some sort of reflection.

I spend about 77% of my time either cooking, painting, or wandering around.

Monday was a pretty slow day, I finished up my last painting for my series and then skyped with the fam! Giving my siblings a much desired wake-up call (I’m sure). I went to the grocery store and picked up some things to eat for meals. I’m trying to live off of $100 a week… except that Cesky Krumlov ate all my money this weekend sooo as of today I have about 40 crowns to live off of til friday ($2). BUT I think I have enough groceries to last me.

Gary made Megan and myself omelets for dinner, which rivaled the Clarke omeletes from NCSU, which is saying something. He’s actually making them right now for us (again). I’m liking this set up.. Megan cuts all the veggies, Gary cooks the whole meal, I sit on my computer listening to music and blogging. I’ll help with dishes though, and say encouraging or helpful things like “That smells good!” or, “Let me know if I can help!” or, “You guys are the best!”. But really I will help do the dishes afterwards.

Yesterday was my first Art & Design critique for our series of paintings, and I think it went really well. It was interesting to see what everyone talked about and suggested for my pieces. It was also cool to compare an Art & Design crit to a Graphic Design crit, which I’m more used to.

Afterwards, I went to the Alphonse Mucha and Salvador Dali exhibit that was happening on the outskirts of Old Town. I’ve always been a fan of these artists, but seeing their work in person, as compared to seeing it on a computer screen, was amazing. I was so blown away by both of them. Mucha has always been one of my favorites, with his beautiful illustrations and advertisements, but I surprisingly enjoyed Dali’s exhibit a bit more. He had more of a point of view, I especially loved his interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy and his elephant sculptures. Like this one:

I eventually went back to the Pension and went to Neklid’s for dinner with some people. I had the cabbage soup and spaghetti carbonara (my new favorite). Then we went to a bar called Puerto Rico around the corner, where I definitely got my crowns worth of tequila in just one margarita (nottt ordering that again). It was fun to just hang out with everyone and I was happily in bed by midnight.

Today for class we went to The Museum of Decorative Arts. For our next series of paintings we needed to pick an object that we saw there and paint it in different contexts. The catch wasss that at first we weren’t allowed to take pictures in there, meaning that I had to sketch these things and then attempt to paint them later. Uhhmmmm. I haven’t sketched for real in like 3 years. Here’s a picture of what I was trying to draw… Then I’ll show you what I drew before I could take pictures.