The Aegean Center’s New Intensive Block Curriculum

A New Way to Teach

Based on fifty years of teaching experience and an awareness of the evolving profile of the contemporary student, the Aegean Center has transformed its program schedule. We have introduced intensive scheduling within a newly formatted twelve week session.  We continue to offer core subjects in drawing, painting, photography, and creative writing. Art history and literature classes are still held. Core studio classes are scheduled every day for two weeks followed by a Bridge Week in which assignments, special projects and cultural activities occur, but regular classes do not meet.  Then two weeks of intensive instruction resume and this pattern repeats throughout the term. This intense learning structure has proven to be enormously successful in our summer program. We see this evolution as a way to make our program more vital and responsive to our students’ needs. As an independent school we are able to respond personally and immediately because we are small by design, unaffiliated with mainstream corporate education, and, without the weight of administration and policy statements we can implement changes efficiently.
  We find this new format is very beneficial. The average student coming to our program is highly connected to the world through social media, but often scattered by too many commitments and pulled in too many directions.  They are enthusiastic, energetic but unfocused at times.  We have discovered through teaching short intensive summer classes that time spent going in depth into a subject translates into a profound pedagogical experience. In two weeks we can cover a month’s worth of material and the student retains this knowledge longer and with more comprehension.  We have a clearer idea as teachers what each student in the group requires and how they best work through problems.  Students are able to work steadily and calmly and don’t tend to procrastinate and leave work until the last moment. It eases social situations as people get to know each by working side by side, promoting conversation and amiability. We also know from research that learning a new skill requires deep concentration followed by down time to allow it to sink into the subconscious mind. When the subject is renewed  the learner finds the information transformed and readily applicable.The above was written as a first announcement of our change of program. We are now in our 5th week of its first trial at the Center. The overall consensus is that it is a true success.  I have been able to progress much more quickly through the material with far more student comprehension. In the first two weeks for instance, I taught basic drawing every day for two hours.  As a class we were able to cover what would have taken 2 1/2 months in the old format.  Because we could delve into topics that were going to be taken up in figure drawing in the subsequent intensive, the students were far better prepared to handle the demands of drawing the model when the time came.  As I taught the figure drawing class I saw that students already had the concepts of perspective, negative space, cross contour and geometrical forms in their hands and minds. The intensive program builds relationships rapidly between the teacher and students as we get to know each other on a daily basis. The students themselves seem to bond more readily and comfortably too as the social contact takes place around classes and art. From solicited comments  from students I hear that they are learning quickly but not feeling overwhelmed. During the Bridge Week they each found a different rhythm. Some took it easy the first half but worked hard later in the week to complete assignments. Others spread their time out and enjoyed having their own schedules to decide when to come to the studio and when to relax, read, or socialise. This Bridge Week some of them have planned a three day trip to Santorini at the weekend.The best aspect of the intensive for me is that I can readily read the level and engagement of each student and the group as a whole and I can adjust my lessons to keep forwarding their skill levels. It is not easy for them to procrastinate and the work becomes a daily habit. I like having the Bridge Week to introduce other activities; book craft (taught by Silina) the first time and monoprinting this week. It invigorates the program and gives the students a new and creative use for their recently acquired skills. John taught a view camera workshop and Jeffrey is taking them to the museum.The majority of the students are doing both photography and painting, nearly all are doing drawing. The overlap of differing aesthetics and media is mind expanding and challenging. Having two or three teachers a day who require that they be attentive is hard work I’m sure, but they seem to be up for it. I feel a lot more relaxed at any rate as the daily unfolding of the lessons keeps me focused without the break between classes which sometimes scatters my momentum.

Clearing storm at the end of a brilliant day

Εγκύκλιο Παιδεία • Liberal Arts

“When we ask about the relationship of a liberal education to citizenship, we are asking a question with a long history in the Western philosophical tradition. We are drawing on Socrates’ concept of ‘the examined life,’ on Aristotle’s notions of reflective citizenship, and above all on Greek and Roman Stoic notions of an education that is ‘liberal’ in that it liberates the mind from bondage of habit and custom, producing people who can function with sensitivity and alertness as citizens of the whole world.” –Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, 1998

Seven Liberal Arts: Francesco Pesellino: 1422-1457 Florence

While hoping to find a way to take a much needed sabbatical many years ago I made some phone calls in search for a person to take over my job for a semester. I talked to a woman who taught at a well known academy in the States, someone who I felt could teach drawing and painting simultaneously as I had been doing for years at the Aegean Center.  I gave her the outline of the program; a three month course, in Greece, teaching 20 hours a week, covering the gamut from printmaking to oil painting.  She brushed aside my inquiry but not because she felt the weight of long hours of teaching, or because the responsibilities were onerous, but because she would need to teach drawing and painting concurrently.  She said that a student needed a full year of basic drawing, followed by a full year of figure drawing before they should be allowed to touch a brush. When I explained that being a single semester abroad program prevented us from spreading out the curriculum in this way she dumbfounded me with her response.  “Well”‘ she said, “I consider myself a fascist when it comes to art instruction”. I thanked her for her time and promptly hung up.

In relating this story to students I often wondered whether the fascist intent was sanctioned by her academy or if it was just her own perverse mindset. I have unfortunately seen and heard of teachers who felt their method was uniquely correct and had no tolerance for other viewpoints. In art classes the slavish adherence to what is fashionable and a blindness to tradition can narrow students responses. As teachers we must all ensure that our students learn the basic skills that will serve them in future no matter which direction the art world takes. I am deeply committed to obtaining and practicing these skills, but to be a self proclaimed fascist in order to attain that objective is repugnant. Recently I contemplated her response again and thought about it in context to the current political climate. It still horrifies me and I still fight against the dictates that her statement implies.

The Liberal Arts were conceived to educate citizens who could uphold the highest ideals of the Greek and Roman cultures.  Rhetoric, grammar, logic comprised the trivium and to these were added the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Over the course of the centuries a liberal arts education has come to means something broader but it still indicates a course of study which seeks to inculcate a student to uphold the fundamental underpinning of a democratic society. The arts, especially the visual arts, play a role in embedding memory, culture and history into the minds of citizens.  The museum plays its part as well as the galleries, publications and criticism. The arts aspire to imagination, forward thinking, to uphold aesthetic ideals and keep sensitivity alert. This perhaps is why the first thing many dictators do is imprison the artists and poets. But art can also be fashioned into propaganda and can in itself become weighted down with rules and dictates. And apparently teaching art can become fascistic as well.

If we are to remain an open society we need to teach the creative process and embody  it as well in our teaching. I try to foster a creative environment in the studio along with emphasizing the discipline that learning an art form demands. Strangely, many art students do not feel creative. The striving to make something of merit often stifles the urge to begin. Creativity requires a certain amount of mess, of boredom, of play and practice in order to perform its magical alchemy. Rigid hierarchical formulae do not help to promote its appearance. We cannot be creative if we are being taught that conforming is the most important requirement.  This is why so many students feel that being creative is a rare gift rather than a natural outcome of their nature, too many years spent in graded, monitored, tested classrooms can kill off the ability to create. Often beginning students are intensely creative before fear and compliance knock them back into simply performing for others.

I stay in my job with pleasure, it keeps me involved in my passions and engaged with young clever minds. I teach drawing and painting but I also feel my job is to awaken students to their own nascent creativity. To engage in the creative process is to grow as a person and as a citizen of the world.  Within the beautiful environment of the Center with its multicultural milieu, with imaginative and intellectual activities and trusting relationships the creative is allowed to emerge.     :Jane Morris Pack

“Those persons, whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens; and . . . they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance.” –Thomas Jefferson, 1779

Half Way

Clearing Storm at the end of a brilliant day

As the last days of October come in with clouds and cold winds, we have arrived at our half term break. Some of the students will be travelling, but the majority of the group are choosing to stay in Paros to work in the studios and the digital lab. It has been a busy and event filled semester. After returning from Italy we introduced the landscape of our lovely island with several hikes, the first was a walk above Lefkes to the inner valley beyond the windmills. There among the olive trees John read an entry from his journal from the time he lived on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. It never fails to move his audience and this time there was a deep quiet as he finished. His words touched us all.

John reading from his journal under the olive trees

Last weekend we sailed around Antiparos with Captain Tasso and had a meal at Zombos, a restaurant at the southern end of the island facing Despotico. We had just strolled about the new excavations of the ancient temple, getting a glimpse into the working of the restorers who are rebuilding the facade of the temple. The winds came up as we finished our meal and Captain Tasso felt we needed to start back to avoid the oncoming storm. It caught up with us anyway and we all got wet, but the students sang and huddle together and we were rewarded with a full rainbow as we turned the corner toward Paros and home.

A few days ago Dimitra Skandalis gave a guest lecture on her work just before she returned to her new home in San Francisco. She shared her ideas and her passions with students and brought along some samples of the work she does with seaweed. She is a former student who is originally from Paros. Her exhibition at the school this summer was her first solo show here on the island.
Now with a much needed break to consolidate information and clarify goals, the students will come back to finish the semester work and prepare to display their efforts for the final exhibition in the first week of December.

Cliffs of volcanic detritus on the backside of Antiparos.

Enjoying the Rain…Hoddies!

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:Thanks, Ken Shiozawa, for the photos and being Student Extraordinaire

Figure Drawing Workshop

Jane Morris Pack

Model in “Plane Suit”

Learning to draw the human figure is a challenge and demands a clear understanding of how to capture form.  It is also a difficult task to do in two weeks but the eight students attending the Intensive Summer Workshop did an amazing job of pulling it all together in a short time. We worked from the model for two hours every morning and then after lunch the projects included working in clay and drawing the bones and muscles. Learning to draw the basic geometric forms was given particular attention as they are the building blocks for all form.  We investigated perspective, built a clay head, foot, hand, nose and mouth.  The students traced their own proportions life size on paper and then added the skeleton and muscles to those drawings. On the final day, as a creative exercise, we hung paper cutouts onto a line and played lights over their forms to suggest movement.

Since drawing is such an intense activity we needed a few distractions to smooth the steep learning curve. One night was spent watching the stars appear from a vantage point high on the mountain after sunset, on another we had a wine tasting of six prominent Greek varietals, and lastly a full day was enjoyed on a wonderful boat trip around the neighbouring island of Antiparos. Thank you to all of my wonderful and enthusiastic students from whom I learn so much.

Jane Teaching

Drawing From the Clay Hand

Muscles & Bones Exercise

Drawing on Black Paper

Figure Cutouts

Working Studio

Summer Oil Painting Workshop 2016

Jane Morris Pack explains the Impressionists assignment

The Aegean Center summer workshop, Oil Painting Innovations, concluded this last Saturday with a successful exhibition at the Center. The five painters showed four paintings each, sharing the space with the watercolour and the photography students from the other workshops. The walls were crowded with excellent work all of which showed a high level of skill and aesthetic involvement.The painting class followed several historical methods chosen for their instructive value; Venetian heightening with white on a dark ground from the 15th century, Flemish floral painting from the 17th century and Impressionist still life from the 19th century. These methods were explained and then explored in order for the students to maximize their understanding of the principals of structured oil paintings. A fourth exercise, which dealt with the painting of an all white still life, was chosen to challenge color mixing choices and the necessary lowering of tone which oil paint dictates.

The process of hand refined linseed oil which we began using a year ago at the Center was demonstrated and  became our medium. It’s unique properties allow us to forgo solvents. The oil is stronger and shinier than the store bought tube oils. The handling is fluid, each touch is recorded. It creates a tough film, maintains textural elements of brushwork and keeps its color integrity when painting wet into wet. We were in the studios every day for six hours six days a week. The new oil paint made it possible for us to continue working without the need for long drying times and so the layers went on quickly. Working on four canvases with different criteria kept us energized. Thank you to my students for their enthusiasm and their dedication.

Chandler Davis [Detail]

Marketa Kemp

Alisha Mehta [Detail]

Erin Jones

An Interview with Jeffrey Carson

Jeffrey Carson, professor of creative writing, art history and literature at the Aegean Center, has recently been interviewed for Parola magazine.

In an in-depth article, Jeffrey reflects on living in Paros since the 1970s along with his wife, photography professor Elizabeth Carson.

“When we first came here in the sixties, we stayed for six months, and then we went back so that both of us could finish our university education. We decided to come back to Paros in the early seventies because I wanted to try writing and my wife wanted to bring her cameras and become a real photographer.  We both did that an until now we are still doing it. When we remembered Paros and our six months here, the photos were beautiful, it was quiet.  It was nothing like the modern world, nothing like New York… We are both New Yorkers.  There were almost no cars.  They had just started the ferry boat.

We lived in an old house, a ‘katoikia,’ we had a donkey and we had a well.  There were no people in the countryside, our light was from oil lamps and we thought this was very poetic.  And although it was difficult, it was poetic.”

Jeffrey also describe his role as a teacher at the Aegean Center since its early years, writing the first guidebook of Paros, and translating all of Elytis’ poems.

“When I was 22 years old, I bought a book called “Four Modern Poets of Greece” — Seferis, Kavafis, Sikelianos and Elytis.  And when I got to Elytis’ poems about the Aegean, I said ‘This is what I am trying to do.  He does it better!’  So I started, as I learned Greek, teaching myself from school books, doing little translations to understand the poems better, and after I’d been doing this for four years — but not seriously — I met Nikos Sarris and he was in love with Elytis.  So we talked and talked and talked and then we made a few translations together.  We sent them to Elytis and he wrote back saying,  “These are the best translations of my work I have ever read.” And that’s how we started.  And then he said “Do you want more?”  So we did.  We translated everything.”

Jeffrey also discusses the changes he has seen in Paros and Greece in the more than forty years that he has lived on Paros and among many other anecdotes, about the time he brought the first piano to Paros:

“The piano was made in 1888 I bought in Athens at Nakas’s and six of us guys had to carry it across the field up to my house.  Within two years children started knocking at my door.  “Give me lessons!  Give me lessons”  for all kinds of instruments because they knew I had been a high school music teacher in New York.  So I taught violin, clarinet, flute and accordion.  So all the kids who knew how to read music in Paros learned from me.”

You can read the full interview here.

A Review: Water. Color. Ink: An Exhibition by Jun-Pierre Shiozawa

Rain over Castro

by Jane Morris Pack

Jun-Pierre Shiozawa is currently exhibiting work at the Argonauta Hotel in Parikia, Paros.  The show is comprised of landscapes, cityscapes, seascapes, as well as nudes and surrealistic dreamlike images. They are all works on paper either with watercolor or ink and demonstrate a range of handling at varied levels of abstraction.

In his artist statement Jun expresses that his watercolor technique was born out of his love of sketching in the natural environment of Paros. Indeed, watercolor is particularly suited to capturing the light drenched vistas of Greece. It is evident that the watery delicate images record his love for the island and they show various locales which are familiar to most of us living here. “Rain on the Castro” or “Small Marina” record our daily backdrop.  They bring with this sense of recognition an enjoyment of seeing things afresh, the chance to notice new feelings and sentiments attached to the familiar. Though they are not sentimental they note the human element: two fishermen talking, a woman hanging laundry. He does not descend, however, into the picturesque. It brings to mind the work of the American painter Winslow Homer, whose images simply record the facts, with no straining for effect, yet manage to convey a particular emotion attached to a view. It is not postcard material, nor merely decorative. We feel in each image that we sit beside the artist for a moment, observant and at ease, sensing the place and the people who inhabit it.

Setting Ship

Jun’s ink work is something different and here he enters the world of dreams: a huge reptile occupies the mosaic floor of a church, an antlered deer wanders among columns of a basilica. In “Setting Ship” a ship plunges vertically into the sea as the sun would into the western horizon. Its rippled reflection shifts our balance and we feel vertigo and tension. The ink work is dark, subterranean in feel, below the level of consciousness, as though our mind recombined images during the night and left us curious on awaking what meaning was intended.

Jun is working now on a series of portraits which will be shown in October. We look forward to seeing them on the wall, all together, for a glimpse once again into our island’s matrix.

Jun-Pierre Shiozawa teaches painting and drawing at The Aegean Center. You can visit his web-site at junpierre.net.

The Almond Tree

From my Calendar Daybook

The previous few Chronicle entries from Jun and Jane were hailing the wonderful art seen during our winter break. I am here now to extol the art of the almond tree in my front garden.

We have been blessed with more rain and the landscape continues to green on Paros. The barley fields are full of tender green shoots that will grow hip deep to further saturate the landscape with a mix of terra verte and cadmium green. Pink Campion and deep golden-orange Calendula are beginning to carpet the terraced fields and soon the wild Gladiolas will appear along the stone terrace walls. The wildflowers cometh.

The almond trees are also blooming! Like a great ball of exploding white confetti; constellations of bright stars descending upon their branches; they dazzle.

This vision calls to mind the wild Dogwoods I remember from the Ozark Mountain forests in the early spring. One stands at the edge of the thick deciduous woodland and there floating in the complex thicket and tangle of the understorey are bright points of white light, hovering and ever so slightly quaking with any breeze that can penetrate the wood as deeply as your vision. Etherial and fine, almost fairy like, butterflies fluttering, Dogwood blossoms in the leafless forest, the myth of the Dark Wood and the promise of Light..the first affirmation of spring.

Under the hardwood canopy of the Ozarks the floating blossoms were subtle; mysterious. On Paros, the almond trees explode…they erupt. They are not merely a promise of Spring but an insistence; a command…

John Pack

The Blooming Almond Tree in Front of My House in the Valley of the Butterflies (click to enlarge)