Living a semester of la dolce vita adds more than pounds.

Three semesters of students from universities across the country are showcasing the results from their months of living in Cortona, Italy, surrounded by art from great masters of the past.

“I think that all of the works that we saw there, it kind of made me think more about the concepts behind my art and how I didn’t want to just sort of paint anymore,” said Campbell Baker, senior painting major from Nashville, Tenn. “I wanted there to be more of a reason.”

Baker’s content-driven strive takes shape through one of her exhibited oil paintings, where a play on words through two languages comes into focus.

“One of them has an Italian word in it that means ‘tart’ and the girl in the painting is kind of, she’s wearing a short little romper,” Baker said. “So I thought it was kind of [an] interesting play on words ’cause we use the word ‘tart’ as kind of a slut I guess, and they don’t use it that way. It’s a dessert.”

Content also came into question for Karina Sibata, senior at the University of Cincinnati, courtesy of Italy.

“I think my interests in cults and superstition were sort of reawakened because I was in a country that is sort of ritualistic in superstition,” she said. “I don’t think I was really interested in painting superstitious things if it weren’t for the fact that I was in this traditional sort of superstitious setting.”

Italy’s churches as well as museums, especially artists such as Giotto and other proto-Renaissance masters, struck Justin Klocke, jewelry and metalsmithing graduate student from Iowa, and his art.

“I ended up actually making prints that were kind of inspired by some of the 13th-century, 14th-century art and architecture,” Klocke said. “But then the plates, like the metal part to make the print … is manipulated and kind of built up into a bowl shape as well.”

It was the Intaglio printmaking class Klocke took in Cortona that allowed him to add a different dimension to his usual work in the medium of metal.

“There’s a lot of parallels between the processes of metal smithing and printmaking,” he said. “And in the end the form, or the plate, becomes unusable in print-making, but then turns into one of the materials for the bowl-making.”

However, Klocke wasn’t solo in his Italian-inspired experimentation.

“Before I never really considered myself a painter,” Sibata said. “And when I did paint it was always in acrylic. But the painting professor, he encouraged us to try oil, and I’m really glad I did because it’s really changed the way I see myself as an artist.”

Kelsey Downie, also a senior from the University of Cincinnati, discovered a similar appreciation for the paths she crossed from studying abroad.

“Maybe not Italy and the surroundings, but the different professors and the different creative place I was in kind of inspired me a little bit more so than usual, changing my surroundings,” she said.

Though Cortona is small, living with classmates outside of the classroom might magnify the program’s numbers.

After all, going to school with 50 people is different than living with 50 people.

“It made me realize that if I really want to be an artist I need to dedicate so much more time than I was,” Baker said, “because everyone there was so hard working, and that was their life and their passion.”

Living in — and then leaving — Italy left more behind than memories and inspiration.

“It was just kind of another sort of thing that I guess just makes you a little more seasoned,” Klocke said, “seasoned at life.”

CORTONA RECEPTION
Where: Lamar Dodd
When: Through Jan. 21