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Starting art school in Boston,
I knew I was going to do abroad.
I decided okay, Venice Program, Venice would be awesome.
There literally is no other city like this city.
Visually, obviously, it's very different.
There's no roads, there's water everywhere.
You see FedEx boats.
The ambulance is a boat.
We have to take a vaporetto, which is a water bus.
It's kind of like the T except it's, you know, a boat.
So you're standing on a boat with a bunch of people.
It took me a couple weeks to get my sea legs.
But, you appreciate the beauty of it once you learn to kind of
mold your life around it.
My butt is toned from all the stairs here.
It's like a stair-master every day.
I like change.
I'm one of those people that actually thrives on it.
I've never been away from home for more than about two months,
from September to Thanksgiving.
It just took a little while to get used to the cultural barrier.
You're trying to learn Italian and it's not easy.
I try to speak to natives and then they rattle off something that I don't understand
so you just stand there with this blah face on.
Well, the thing that's annoying is you go, "poco piano por favor,"
try to get them to talk a little slower
and then they start talking in English.
Everybody does speak a little bit of English
but you want to integrate yourself
and not stick out like a sore thumb.
When all of your work kicks in,
then it becomes like you're just at art school.
I am taking everything from Italian art history,
painting, water color, and etching.
This is aqua tint.
I just learned today.
It's a lot of work and as soon as you get one thing done,
you know, you still have four other things to do.
It came out whiter.
The buildings, the architecture, the color--
it's literally like all sorts of ideas are flying in your head
and just bottlenecking at your hand because you can't paint that fast.
Why I came is cause I wanted my art to be influenced by what's going on here.
Themes here are all religious, which is interesting.
I had this whole illustration kick
and I'm also really into comic books.
I love Captain America getting crucified.
When I said I don't want to necessarily offend people in the critique,
one of the women said, "Well that's a shame."
I just thought that was kind of cool.
You kind of just have to know why you're going to do it
because I don't want it to be another painting that just ends up getting written off
because it's just someone trying to make shock value.
I feel like you would just [bleep] around
if you weren't an art major
and you were studying abroad here.
You're looking at everything from an artist's perspective--
looking at the art and not just being completely overwhelmed by everything there is to see.
What's really helpful was art history,
actually, because art history contextualizes everything that's here.
The reason why I know anything about this city is because of this art history class,
honestly.
We meet somewhere in the city--
or Rome, or Florence, or Milan, or Padova, has been the case.
Most of the places we go to are churches.
I cannot look at another altar piece.
I swear to God I'm going to kill somebody if I look at another altar piece.
We talk about the church,
we talk about the architecture,
and we talk about the paintings within the church.
It's so much better than studying from a book.
You study the Sistine Chapel in a book
and you have this idea about it,
but then when you actually go with your class
and you see it
everything just changes.
So the fact that I got that opportunity is
more than I could ask for.