Fieldtrippin'

                                                                                                                                                           Today, we journeyed south to Paulson Bott Press and the Berkeley Art Museum. Starting at Paulson, students met Gallery Director Rhea Fontaine, printer and OS11 alumn Alexander "Z" Groshong, and intern Will as they poured over stacks of Gee's Bend quilt prints. Students learned about the tradition of fine art printing, Paulson Bott's model of 2-week artist residencies, and the many techniques its printers must master and sometimes invent. This place is stuffed to the brim with unbelievable prints, ink, sketches, and various ephemera from past projects. The genuine enthusiasm for printmaking was infectious; we were thrilled to get a sneak peek into such an intense process and spend some time in their beautiful studio and gallery.

OS11 alumn Z Groshong shows OS31 a copperplate and explains the printing process.

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Afterward, we headed across town to the Berkeley Art Museum to admire the incredible building and enjoy a handful of fantastic shows including a collection of massive Hans Hoffman paintings, a more intimate presentation of Forrest Bess's work, and poignant mixed media and video work by Geta Brătescu.The museum proved to be a fantastic site for exploration, whether via zooming among the many ramps, extensive sketchbooking, or having some lighthearted arts and crafts fun in the children's section. Because hey, everyone's a kid when free crayons and clay are involved. 

Lunch on/in a sculpture at the BAM's sculpture garden. 

photography by Chris R. and Megan

"a different intention of the eye"

After the most eventful first weekend in recent memory, OS31 is settling nicely into the swing of things here at Oxbow starting with their first class, "Observation," which is team taught by an art faculty and a humanities faculty: Painting/Science, New Media/English, and Sculpture/History combine for a uniquely Oxbowhemian liberal arts experience.

Students in Painting/Science split their time between the studio and the gardens, familiarizing themselves with all Oxbow's systems of "at home" food production. While drawing and painting in the gardens and the studios, students considered the shared qualities of artistic and scientific observation. They study form and function through dissection, consider micro and macro scales, and channel these into field studies, mapping, and diagramming. 

photography: Megan, Sam, and Charley

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Students in New Media/English employed visuals and text to record the world around them as actively participating artists and storytellers. Through engaging with photography, audio, and film, students formed nascent portraits of their new homes in Napa. Enjoy this piece by Hannah W:

"The Bird" by Hannah W.

I walked behind a small building

and listened to the leaves rustling in the wind,
quiet whispers that echoed against the concrete walls. 
A few small leave caught my eye,
their careful blades gently scraping the concrete
as the breeze swept under them.
I held my camera up, the viewfinder creating a tiny crease on my nose, and aimed it at the brown and red leaves.
                                                     With a click, I snapped a picture and moved farther down the line of leaves,
                                                      like I was following a trail of breadcrumbs.

But those leaves led me to something unexpected. 
A bird laid lifeless against the wall, its eyes closed halfway
and its talons clenched tightly.
It laid on its back so that its talons faced the sky
and its wings draped around it like a blanket.
The wings. 
The wings were like clusters of tree trunks made from satin,
one on top of the other.
To see such beauty and sadness is rare,

                                                      so I raised my camera.

                                                     With a click, its intricate wings appeared on the screen.
                                                     Fifty clicks rattled by, and the bird was captured in my camera. 

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The Sculpture/History Observation project is Top Secret. 

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This week's post title is excerpted from Henry David Thoreau's "Autumnal Tints"

OS31 Rocks the House!

Well OS31 is certainly off to a rollicking start! Within a week of meeting each other, we rode out a 6.0 earthquake together in the dead of night just 9 miles north of the epicenter. Though it was the region's strongest temblor in 25 years, no one on campus was injured, damage to school facilities (though they did occur) was sparse, and an "Earthquake Playlist" is in the works!* Damage to Napa at large, however, was quite extensive and we will attempt to aid our neighbors through the process of recovery as we are needed. Thanks to an all day dorm evacuation, OS31 has already spent many hours in the studios on assignments and personal work. With any luck, this is a sign of an exciting (though hopefully less life threatening) semester in store for us as we enter our 16th year of operation.

Check this blog throughout the semester for weekly posts and contributions from our students!

Meet OS31!




*track list coming soon

So Long, OS30

Today the Oxbow campus is eerily quiet and still...yesterday, OS30 departed. They finished off their semester with a tremendously successful Final Show (which we hope you had the pleasure of seeing) and a busy last week of cleaning, packing, letter writing, and closing ceremonies. The last days were full of both laughter and tears, fitting companions for a time when something so special is coming to an end. 

OS30, we are proud of you. We send you off with the best of luck, and the assurance that you will always be part of the Oxbow family. We'll miss you and your hula-hooping, caesar salad-loving, grilled cheese-devouring smiles. Bon voyage!

*A special thank you is due to all the parents out in blog-land: thank you for sharing your wonderful children with us!

FINAL SHOW

Please join us in celebrating Oxbow's 15th year: come see OS30 and their amazing work, Saturday and Sunday May 17-18, 1-3pm in the Oxbow School studios. 

CAUTION: ARTISTS AT WORK

Anela checks her copper plate during a spit-bite aquatint etching session

NEWS FLASH: the Final Countdown has begun! Final Projects are due in TWO DAYS! OS30 has been working tirelessly in the studios for weeks on end, and the intensity level is rising by the minute. It's fair to say that everyone is exhausted, but in a good way. Walking around the studios this week has been particularly exciting because THINGS ARE REALLY HAPPENING--the students are working with impressive focus and very advanced craft. They have become experts in their media of choice, and are using tools and techniques that many adult artists don't know how to use. Here's a glimpse of some of our Oxbohemians at work.  

Brem painting

Rose and Patrick work on shaping Rose's surfboard

Zen editing his film 

Valentina takes a break from power grinding 

Iggy makes progress on his stencil

Zoe and her spider factory

MARK YOUR CALENDARS: OS30's FINAL SHOW AND OPEN HOUSE IS MAY 17-18

Backyard Pizzeria

Each semester, students and faculty descend on Stephen's outdoor pizza oven for an evening. This tradition usually falls at the start of Final Projects and is a well loved and much appreciated break from the studio-grind. Students are coached on how to create the pies by Mo, our Pizza Making History Teacher/History Making Pizza Teacher who mans the oven. With delicious dough provided by the dining hall ladies and a veritable production line of toppings, pizza after pizza was assembled (all creatively garnished) and popped into the oven. Many of the ingredients came from the school's gardens; OS30 chowed down on some beautiful fennel and garlic (planted by OS29! Thanks, guys!) and even an ox-egg or two.

We're a community of expert pizza-makers now and are covered in flour to prove it. Here's a quick pizza making lesson for the rest of you: First, sprinkle flour on a pizza peel (a wooden or metal board) and then relax the dough by letting it hang, rotating it so it stretches evenly into a circle (or blob, or triangle, or anything you can manage). You can also toss the dough up in the air but as some of us learned, many things get in the way like your head, trees, other people, and the ground. Lay the dough on the peel, making sure there is an even layer of flour underneath allowing the dough to "scooch" off when loaded into the oven. Choose your toppings and let the oven do the rest!

Special thanks to Anela for her hip pics and to Sarah for surprising all of us with bubbles and sidewalk chalk. As the Final Show rapidly approaches, we hope to have more fantastic celebrations together.

Swarm Season

A bucket full of bees!

Last week, while the kiddos were away on spring break, exciting things were happening in the Oxbow neighborhood. In sync with the arrival of spring, honeybees started swarming! We were very fortunate to notice a swarm resting in a tree near campus, and were even more fortunate to capture the swarm and set it up in a new hive. Here we'll tell you the story of how it happened, and what it means when bees swarm.

Honeybees swarm when they have outgrown their hive and are ready to set up a new colony. Swarming generally happens in the spring when the weather warms up and the bees jolt into action. A hive prepares itself for swarming by raising a virgin queen, who will take over the hive while the old queen leaves to start the new one. When she's ready, the old queen takes flight, and, loyal to her pheromones, thousands of worker bees follow her. As they leave the hive together they form a fluid cloud searching for a place to land. Collectively, they amass somewhere safe and wait as scout bees make flights out and about in search of a suitable new home. This scouting search can take anywhere from hours to days, and while the bulk of the bees are waiting, they form an amorphous mass that can take on wild and beautiful shapes. This is what our swarm looked like, hanging from a tree on Third Street. 

If you can manage to capture a swarm, it's a great way to start a new hive. But catching a swarm can be a bit tricky, especially if it's waaaaay up in a tree like this one was. First we had to collect some tools and supplies. Among them were five-gallon buckets, into which we put some pieces of wax comb. The comb is there to attract the bees--its feel and smell say "HOME!" to honeybees. 

Oh, we should mention that at this point we had also called our beekeeper buddies over at Napa Valley Bee Co. They are swarm-catching experts and knew just what to do. With the comb-baited bucket in hand, beekeeper Jason climbed a (very tall) ladder. He gently snuck the bucket under the mass of bees, and very slowly and patiently guided the swarm off the tree branch and into the bucket. This process took upwards of THREE HOURS. Let's just say that Jason is a Zen Bee Master. It was an amazing process to watch, and in the end, there were actually so many bees that we had to use a second bucket. This was an unusually large swarm!

After the swarm was secured into our two buckets, we whisked them over to our bee buddy's apiary where there was an empty hive box waiting for occupants. Setting up the bees in their new home was quite simple--we just gently dumped the bucket onto the hive frames! Recognizing that they were home, the bees quickly crawled down into the frames and started settling in. Very soon after arrival, the queen will have started laying eggs to populate the new colony.

Here are our girls in their new home! While they get established, we'll be preparing a new spot for the hive to live on campus. And we've planted a huge row of flowers over in the Back 40 to make sure they have plenty of forage this summer. Just a couple days ago we saw another swarm heading down Third Street, but it landed too far out of reach...it's busy bee season over here in Napa!