Arrowmont 2008 - Part II

July 8, 2008. Tuesday.

This was the day I had planned for the students to learn how to see the world a bit differently. I started out with a slide show of my own design inspirations. Then we spent the rest of the day working with digital cameras to take photos of textures, forms, shades of color, and light.

Most of my students told me that they will never see the world in the same way again and that they now know how to find inspiration for design ideas. That's a successful exercise in my book.

I'll post images from the exercise in my next entry to the blog.

We spent the morning walking around the Arrowmont campus - taking digital photos of everything imaginable. The early afternoon was spent across the street at the aquarium, and then I spent the rest of the day doing one-on-one with students to look at their images. From the several hundred photos, I had them narrow it down to eight of their favorite images.




Part of the fun of this exercise was in exploring campus in a different way. This is the porch of the staff house. The Shaker rocking chairs, the siding, screens, floor, art objects - all were selected for study.







I took them into the lounge area to look at the various art objects. Again, this was a lot of material for digital photo studies.









I really enjoyed staying in the staff house. The lounge area was a very relaxing place to hang out at the end of the day.










The staff lounge had an entrance to the dining hall, too, so it was pretty convenient to get from my room to the main hangout for meals.






The next stop on our photo exercise tour was the main building. I had the students walk through the faculty art exhibit and explore ideas for texture there. This is Damon McIntyre, the resident wood artist for this year. When he found out what I was doing for this part of the class, he asked if he could tag along. We all enjoyed having him participate in this exercise.






While the students were exploring, I popped into a couple of the studios that are in the main buidling. This was the metal class taught by Tom McCarthy (standing at the blackboard).









The faculty gallery space. Hal examing one of the wall hangings.









Myra doing some close-up images.












The fiber studio. They were having way too much fun this week.










Iza Taylor (in the apron), teaching the glass class.











The glass studio










I had shown part of this hallway in my previous post. This is the entire area with all the postcards and posters. It's pretty cool. I spent a bit of time studying the pictures.








A view of the bookstore. Wow - this was another incredible resource. I bought some books on ceramics, inspiration, philosophy, and several other media. I would have like a couple of hours extra to explore it further.





I had been getting up early in the morning to do a walk before breakfast. I had walked along the river in Gatlinburg and it really didn't sink into my at that time of day what a tourist trap Gatlinburg really is. When we walked across the street to the aquarium after lunch, it was pretty obvious that this is a vacation destination. I'm not quite sure what the attraction is, but people come here by the thousands.



The main drag was chock full of cars and people. I have to confess that this kind of place is not where I would choose to vacation. I want to be away from people in natural areas when I take a break from it all. To each his own, I suppose.

Arrowmont is an oasis away from this chaos. While you're in the studio, the world goes on without your input.






The aquarium is, apparently, one of the vacation draws. There were a gazillion people in here, which made photography a real challenge. The lighting is also very dim, which posed some other challenges. However, the images that came from this part of the day were really fantastic and will provide a lot of design ideas for everyone in the class. Stay tuned for those pics in the next post.