Month: October 2012

The Oxbow School

I recently had the good fortune of visiting the Oxbow School in Napa, California. Oxbow offers a semester of intensive artistic and creative inquiry for juniors and seniors in High School. From what I have heard from students who attended Oxbow in the past and from what I could see during my brief visit, Oxbow offers the space and time for students to have a truly transformative experience, while working toward cultivating an authentic voice through visual media. I am left both impressed and inspired with what the program aspires toward and what it achieves.

These are a few of the studios on the Oxbow campus. Each space is committed to one or two disciplines, each has a good deal of natural light and each is rather idyllically aligned on the shore of a slow, serpentine river.

Above is the founding director and head of school (right), Stephen Thomas, working with a student on her Fortune Cookie assignment. This is an assignment whereby students are given a word, revealed to them in a fortune cookie, from which they are expected to produce a work of art.

Venice

On bikes are how many a good adventure have begun. This past weekend was no exception. I visited an old friend from Prescott College, Pascal Shirley in Venice CA. Here we are riding to the Abbot Kinney Festival.

Matt, in from Toronto.

Venice attracts some colorful people.

And has some amazing light.

We saw a really good performance by the band Nite Jewel.

Here is Pascal taking some photographs. I have been impressed with his work, an oeuvre of lifestyle portraits, for as long as I have known him-you can check out his Tumblr at http://pascalshirley.tumblr.com.

Thanks for a great visit, Pascal!