Masks, day four

New faces greeted us in the studio this afternoon--the work of the students from the morning session.

There seems to be a revelation at every stage of mask construction. Today's was one of the most exciting: peeling the actual latex mask out of the plaster negative.

People were visibly delighted to meet their masks at last. Ryan let out a laugh like a new parent. Before long the studio was full of new characters--a Capitano and a Magnifico...

...and a Pantalone, a Pulcinella, and another Capitano.

We used scissors and rotor tools to trim off the excess latex and fiberglass. The eye sockets are really difficult. I'm not sure what sort of tool might make them easier. Possibly a really sharp X-acto, in combination with a face-shaped cutting mat. Not that face-shaped cutting mats actually exist, as far as I am aware.

The last step was priming the masks with some sort of lacquer, the genuine gommalacca made by dissolving beetle dung in alcohol. (Lino explained all that in Italian, complete with a diagram of the pooping beetle. I love commedia.) Tomorrow we paint. The first masks we'll be painting to look like leather; the second ones we can paint as we wish. On half an Arlecchino mask, Lino demonstrated using acrylics to accentuate the contours.

The other half of the mask is still brown. Beetle poop will do that.

Expat Thanksgiving

Everyone at the villa is a bit homesick today. Some people say it outright. For others it's not as obvious, but I get the sense that more people are gathering in common areas, needing some sort of family. There's going to be a turkey dinner tonight, but we have classes the same as any other day, and our European faculty seem quietly bemused about the whole concept of Thanksgiving. Lunchtime conversation turned to the foods we missed--pumpkin pie, barbecue, green chile--and then to more general lacks such as being able to cook in a kitchen, watching the football broadcast, taking a break from eating to toss around a football with your dad--all these unremarkable moments that somehow turn out to be rituals.

But it seems much more in the spirit of the day to turn my attention from what I don't have to what I do. I'm in Italy, living out an artist's dream of education and exploration, and I'm here because of the emotional and practical support of several wonderful people who I am lucky to have in my life. I'll be coming home to a different president-elect, and--even more important--the knowledge that I am not at all alone in wanting to work for social change. I am surrounded by beauty, by people who stimulate my mind and my creativity and my compassion and my funny bone, and that's pretty amazing. Thanks, everyone.

Pulling faces

Under the watchful eyes of former students, we proceeded with making our actual masks--pulling them from the molds, to use the studio argot.

First we dug away the slabs of clay forming the frame, and then prised the plaster from the clay positive. I was a little sad to realize that this meant the end of the clay positive. Few of them survived the process. On detailed features like my mask's eyebrows, the clay tended to lodge in the tiny hollows between the ribs of plaster, which meant a fair amount of excavation with wooden tools, wire tools, and wet and dry brushes--like some combination of an archeologist and a dentist.


Once the plaster negative was clean, we coated the inside with liquid latex. We started by turning the nose into a sort of reservoir, and then swirling the latex around the negative. (I couldn't do that and take pictures at the same time, so this is an image of Zach's Magnifico negative.)

With a brush, we added more latex, and spread it around more. Then we added a thin layer of fiberglass and tamped it into place with more latex. Maybe this part of the process comes naturally to some people. Not to me. The bristles of the brush and the bristles of fiberglass kept getting tangled and messy, and I kept having to stop and peel boogers of dried latex off my fingers so that I wouldn't stick to things. But eventually I dried the latex with a hairdryer, and added another layer of latex and fiberglass and got it dry too.

Then it was time to be good artists and take care of our medium. So that it could be reused, all the clay from the positives had to be washed--torn into small chunks, immersed, and kneaded until the bits of plaster floated free. This is long, repetitive work, but there's something to be said for chatting with three friends with your hands together in a tub of mud. Anything that makes you laugh until you cry can't be all bad.

Siena, times two

I never posted the photos from my first day trip to Siena (back in October), so I'm combining images from that trip and the one this past Saturday.

The zebra-striped Duomo is one of my favorites in Italy so far.

The interior shifts between solemnity and a sort of brilliant goofiness, as if people just kept adding pretty things without knowing when to stop.

This is probably what a cathedral would look like if Strange Tree Group decorated it.

Of course, there are marvelous pieces of art...

...and vertiginous views of the city from the top of the arcade above the Duomo museum, on the wall that would have been part of the Duomo's nave if the Black Plague hadn't wiped out half the city and the cathedral-building workforce.




There's also food. The ceiling of this shop is thick with wild boar sausages, hocks of prosciutto, strings of garlic, and everything else you could want. Behind the counter are ten different kinds of pecorino. The air is redolent with cinnamon from the bakery on the premises. The owner--of course--wears a tall white paper hat and has a wide, curling moustache and gives you slices of salami his sister has made.

The other wonderful thing I tried--and it was probably made exponentially more wonderful by the freezing weather--was a traditional soup called acqua cotta. It's vegetable soup (broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, onions, cabbage, celery, and something--probably peperoncini--with a kick) that has been put in the broiler for a bit, and is then served over grilled bread, all topped with a poached egg. This, too, I will be making in the depths of the Chicago cold.

Day two of the mask intensive

It seems somewhat anticlimactic to say that day two began with much of what we did on day one: refining the clay features, checking for symmetry, getting the face the way you want it. My Dottore began to feel very much like me. In fact, twice I sprayed water on the cheeks to smooth out the clay, and almost instantly I felt as though I were close to tears. (I chalked it up to the plaster dust in the air, but no mistake, there's something spooky about the kinship between actor and mask.)

Once the faces were in good shape, we constructed frames for them out of flat slabs of clay. Rather than simply framing the face positives, the frames went around the edges of the final mask (more or less from the upper lip to the earlobe at the bottom, and a couple of centimeters above the hairline at the top). So suddenly our masks all looked like bib-wearing conquistadores--with the exception of Zach's Magnifico, whose frame and props looked like flowing hair and so turned him into a distant kinsman of Michelangelo's Moses.

The frames had a purpose, which was to contain drips of plaster. We mixed up great tubs of it--you stir it with your fingers, an experience that rivals kneading bread for sheer pleasure--and then drizzled it over the faces, with the same gestures I remember using to make mud-drip sand castles as a child. Once the face is covered and you've carefully blown on all the bubbles until they pop, you dip strips of fabric--coarse burlap in this case--into the plaster. Then you put a layer of plaster-coated fabric over the whole face.

By then, the plaster was thickening, so we had to hurry through the best part: scooping up fistfuls of plaster and splatting them over the fabric. (It's fun because, well, you're scooping up big messy fistfuls of plaster, but also because plaster gets warm as it dries, probably because of some oxidation process I should remember from chemistry.) Each mask turned into a featureless mound of white plaster; the long-nosed Capitano masks were slightly distinguished by a peak in the middle of the mound. We smoothed out the mounds with a spatula. Zach pointed out that they looked like nothing so much as a window display of gelato. All vanilla.

Tomorrow the plaster will have hardened into a negative, which will be the basis for the latex mask itself. I hope that will yield some good photos--the closeup of the featureless white lump didn't quite make for a riveting image.

Masks and snow

The villa has spent most of the day in a dark, cold rain only one step removed from sleet. There's snow in the hills nearby. The radiators are doing their best, but heat is state-rationed in Italy, so everyone's hunkering down in multiple layers of sweats and scarves.

Today we started our mask-making intensive with Lino. Each of us has chosen one commedia mask to make; from this mold we'll each pull one copy for future students of the Accademia and one for ourselves.

Everyone starts by smearing clay on a plaster or cement positive. The Accademia has a number of cement positives in varying sizes and shapes, and most students are working with positives that approximate their own faces. Zach and I, since we had molds taken for The Persians, are working with those positives. It's a disconcerting, alienating experience to sculpt upon your own features. If the masks weren't grotesques, I think I'd be tempted to correct certain aspects of my face.

It's been years since I've worked in an art studio, and I didn't realize how much I missed it. The visual and plastic arts have always been able to take me to a place of happy calm akin to a runner's high or the mental state immediately after yogic meditation. Working with clay, in particular, is so immediate and tactile that you can almost bypass your brain and let your eyes and hands do all the work. (Lino says, in fact, that the eyes are the more important factor: being able to observe matters more than being able to work with your hands.) It's especially gratifying to sculpt after spending so much time in the past three months looking at and thinking about the great sculptures of the Renaissance.

Once the positives were coated evenly with clay, we began to build up the characters' features. You start with the nose and work out. The nose is obviously the salient point of most commedia characters. Some historians draw correspondences between nose size and stupidity, with the long-nosed Capitano as the biggest idiot on stage. The nose is also usually where the character's traditional resemblance to a particular animal becomes clear (though not always, as in the infamous case of the Arlecchino mask with the forcibly enlarged cat eyes). And on a purely practical level, it's the most exaggerated feature on almost every mask, so you have to use it as the basis for the rest of the proportions.

I'm working on a Dottore mask, since that's the character I tend to play best.

Lino commented that almost every first mask tends to look somewhat like its creator. He singled my mask out as an example. And everyone else agreed: apparently I make this face all the time as the Dottore.

Tomorrow we'll refine the clay molds. Then they'll become the basis for negative molds, which we'll use to create the actual latex masks. I think I'd be happy to keep working in clay forever.

Florence in the cold

Apparently winter comes even to Italy. This weekend garlands of Christmas lights and pine boughs appeared in the streets of Florence. Joe came to visit, and on Friday--bundled up--we set out to meet the Renaissance. The first stop was the Duomo, whose exterior reminds me of an elaborate sugar confection.

I was expecting a similarly ornate interior, but it's actually pretty spare inside. Apparently it was always somewhat restrained, and then it was cleaned out because of the flood of 1966. There's no such restraint, however, in the Vasari frescoes in the dome, which depict the Last Judgment. Several panels feature sinners either being flayed or peeling off their own skins.

At the top of the cupola--after a series of steep, twisty, low-ceilinged staircases that are pure nightmare fodder--is a lovely view of the city.

There's also an incredible amount of graffiti. Even though Italian gave us the word graffiti, I've been surprised at how much of it I see here, especially on monuments. The statue in the Arezzo Prato, for example, which shows (I think) native son Petrarch receiving his laurel wreath, is spray-painted with legends such as "Emo Lesbos." But I digress.

We went to the Science Museum, which we'd both been looking forward to. As it turned out, two of the three floors were under construction and therefore off limits. But we did see Galileo's middle finger. Apparently one need not be a saint to ignite obsessive interest in the preservation of one's body parts, or else someone wanted to prevent his posthumously flipping the bird to the Church. We also saw a fantastic exhibit on the development of the Galilean and Newtonian telescopes.

From there, in the thickening rain, we headed to Santa Croce.

It, too, is currently under construction--what looks like a restoration project for the frescoes behind the altar. Major sections of the interior are hidden behind scaffolds and drapes.

But the side chapels and frescoes--especially those by Giotto--are still wonderful.

Santa Croce also houses the tombs of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo. Minus his finger, of course.

Dante would have been entombed here if he hadn't been banished from the city--nothing like carrying a grudge past the grave, although you could argue that Dante himself did a fair amount of that in the Inferno. But there's a memorial statue of him outside.


When we came out, dusk was falling--early, because of the rain--and the whole city seemed chilly.

By night, the Duomo looks much less like candy.


We spent Saturday in Siena--which will have to be a whole separate post. This morning Florence was brilliantly sunny. You can just see the Ponte Vecchio in the background here (the foreground bridge is the Ponte San Trinità).

We crossed the Arno and headed to the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, which houses the Brancacci Chapel. In this chapel are the Masaccio frescoes that changed everything, that decisively brought human emotion and individuality into Renaissance art. From art history class I remembered the image of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden, but it's another thing altogether to see the actual fresco on the wall, the matter-of-factness of this revolution, off to the side in a silent, almost deserted church. This I suppose is what Walter Benjamin means when he talks about the aura of a work of art, and I have to admit that in this case he seems to be right. Anyway, I long for my art history textbook and notes; I have the sense that all these works have suddenly come to life around me.

On the way back we happened to glance into an open doorway, and so discovered an item that clearly belongs on the list of Best Things Ever: the pasta vending machine.

I wish I could report that we were brave enough to try it.

Masks of Venice

Here's a catch-up post from a trip last month.

Venice is a strange place. Walking through it I had the same sense I had when I walked through pre-Katrina New Orleans: This city is devoted almost entirely to separating tourists from their money. The feeling isn't as sinister in Venice, but it's certainly there.

The other thing Venice does really well is decorate. Every possible surface is gilt, or embroidered, or inlaid, or all three. My friend Jesse notes that the Bedazzler hit Italy in 1987 and never left, and it's true; it takes some work to find a sweatshirt that doesn't bear some sort of rhinestone-sequin legend such as "Rock Princess." But even by Italian standards, Venice is ornate. I started to wonder if there were some sort of island aesthetic at work--the same way island populations develop pronounced genetic quirks, perhaps they can develop a weakness for masks decoupaged with staff paper and gold paint. I think it's possible. After only a couple of days, even if you previously thought that masks were the height of kitsch, it starts to seem perfectly normal to fork over 60 euros to buy one.


Of course, these aren't theater masks. They're tourist masks, meant to evoke the Carnival of Venice. There are all sorts of old links between carnival rites and theatrical rites, but the bottom line is, theatrical masks reveal character, and these masks conceal; theatrical masks are living masks, and these are dead.


Some of the elaborations, though, were fantastic, and I wished people had turned this creativity to theatrical design rather than tourism.

But I'm certain they make more money from tourism.


As a postscript, just because I'm kind of proud of it, here's a photo from today's studio time.

The book is our philosophy textbook--all the theater students take a seminar in the aesthetics of art and performance--but mostly I'm excited about being able to hold a headstand well enough to pose for a silly photo. Even if my legs are a bit crooked. Certain muscles are stronger than they've ever been.

The Olive Harvest

Two weeks ago we began harvesting olives from the villa's small grove, with students helping out as they could. Harvesting involves spreading out a tarp or a net over the ground beneath the tree, then raking the olives from the branches. I've seen some people actually use a little hand rake to do it. We just used our hands.

Our olives are relatively small, a mix of green and black. The ones here are a bit wizened; they were overlooked in the harvest.

An uncured olive, right off the tree, is one of the foulest tastes you can ever have in your mouth. It's inescapable and bitter--the word that comes to mind is alkaline, although I have no idea whether that's accurate--and the oil coats your tongue in a way that makes the flavor hang around for hours.

But of course the oil--pressed, with the water removed--is a different story. Today at lunch we had oil made from the olives we helped pick. And it was fantastic. We're in the olive oil capital of the world, of course, but apparently this variety of oil would retail for about $35 a liter in the U.S.

It's not as olive-y or briny as some oils I've tasted. There's a slight bite to the flavor, which is clearly the pleasant counterpart of the raw olives' bitterness. And it's beautiful--almost as green as absinthe.

Sunrise

I awoke this morning to brilliant pink light on the shutters. I got up and saw this:


It vanished almost as quickly as I could photograph it. But it made me feel as though whatever I decide about next year, the world will go on, and it's going to be all right.

Chocolate and choices

I've been preoccupied for a couple of days because, unexpectedly, I may have the option of staying here for a few more months. It would mean all sorts of logistical issues to work out, including perhaps giving up my apartment in Chicago, my home for seven years, a place I love and have made my own. And it would essentially mean that I couldn't be in a show until September, which feels like a very long time. But it could also mean I could take a full-head mask intensive with the founder of Familie Flöz. And it would mean more time in Italy. The expat experience is really important for artists (especially, when I think about it, the majority of artists I most admire); I think we tend to forget about it in today's America.

As if to persuade me, Arezzo had a chocolate festival today. There is no doubt in my mind: Italy produces the best hot chocolate in the world. (I feel fairly secure saying that, as the only other real pretenders to the throne are the Swiss, and what are they going to do, attack me? Even if they do, decades of neutrality will have left them unprepared to face a chocolate-fueled actor who's been training in German acrobatics.)

I tried a number of things, including a few varieties of hot chocolate, a coffee-cream croissant, a tiny bittersweet chocolate-peperoncino truffle with a little crunch to it, and an apparently famous Neapolitan tart that I thought was not as good as the croissant. And I saw many others, such as chocolate-hazelnut salami, giant mounds of truffle ganache covered in hazelnuts (by "giant" I mean at least as big around as a hubcap, and probably 10 inches tall), and chocolate liqueur sold with a little bag of shot glasses made from the same stuff as ice cream cones. Which struck me as a very good idea.

Also a good idea: the Nutella crepe. This is part of what makes Italy so good--they take one of the high points of French cuisine and say, Sure, not bad, but you know what we could do with this? Fill it with warm Nutella, fold it in quarters, and sell it on street corners. And it is brilliant.

Later, no closer to a decision, I went for a twilight run in the park (one of the things I will miss no matter when I leave; it's just off the path to the grocery store). The air came alive with bells, as it does here, and on my iPod Snow Patrol started playing "Chocolate": "This could be the very minute I'm aware I'm alive / All these places feel like home."

That's true. They do feel like home--Arezzo and Chicago alike.

Maybe I'll just wake up tomorrow and know.

Cortona: Le Celle

Last weekend I went back to Cortona, accompanied this time by a map and Rich, a fellow student. We were determined to find Le Celle, the Franciscan monastery several miles from the centro. So, fortified by a cioccolata densa (an Italian hot chocolate, bittersweet and with the consistency of pudding), we set out on our hike.

Fall has settled onto the Tuscan mountains.

At the midpoint of the hike is the Cappella Bentivoglio, a tiny stucco chapel for wayfarers and pilgrims.


Around 3:30 we arrived at Le Celle. It's built into the living rock of the mountainside, something like the cliff dwellings of the Southwest.



This is the part of the day words fail to capture. The monastery is still active, and the stillness of the place is so great I had the sense of being able to hear each individual bird's song in the surrounding forest. We came down a long brick path to a tiny chapel adjacent to the cell where St. Francis lived and meditated. He may have built it himself. If the doorway and bed (a narrow wooden plank set into the wall) are any indication, I'm taller than he was.

One cell next to the chapel is set up as something of a gift shop--with a few ten-cent postcards, icons of St. Francis, books, and tau amulets made of olive wood--but in its Franciscan way it's sort of defiantly anti-tourist and anti-capitalist: it's unstaffed, and it works on the honor system.

We roamed around the grounds and paths, occasionally hearing singing from the church behind the monastery. Here I should let the images take over, in the hopes of conveying the beauty and silence of the place.





The sun was setting over the pine trees and olive terraces when we began the hike back.


We took a different way around the city wall, climbing higher than we had on our way out. More or less at the summit we encountered the cathedral of Santa Margherita, by the light of the rising moon.

Mass was in progress, so we couldn't go in. And it was getting cold. We wound back down through Cortona's steep streets to the Piazza della Republica for another cioccolata densa.

Then, since we still had an hour to kill before catching the bus back to Arezzo, and as actors and true Franciscan pilgrims neither of us had much cash, we tried to find a bar serving free primi piatti. (It's fairly common here to order a beer and then help yourself to bruschetta, small panini, cheese, sausage, or salad.) Rich remembered that the bar in the civic theater building had primi piatti the last time he was in Cortona, so we tried it. The bar appeared to be closed, but we heard a lot of voices upstairs. We went up a level and saw trays of bruschetta and bottles of wine. The voices were still upstairs; it sounded like a gallery opening. We wondered if maybe we could blend in, look at the art for a bit, and have a few bruschette.

And that was where Clown reasserted itself in the day, because we went up another level and the first thing we saw was a mannequin in full Pulcinella garb. The exhibit was about theater design, with costume sketches and scenic designs for numerous Goldoni plays, as well as some Shakespeare and twentieth-century plays--even an Italian-language production of Long Day's Journey Into Night. We came in expecting to crash the party, and it turned out we belonged there.

The bruschette were delicious.