Welcome!

Welcome to the Art in Nature Blog for the Rambling Adventure Club!

We're super excited to have the opportunity to teach this class this semester and hope you get a lot out of it.  We want this to be a co-creative experience and would love to incorporate any ideas that you have throughout the semester into course activities.

Our intention is to highlight some of the people who have had an impact on our personal development as artists, and on the field of nature art in general.  Each day will begin the way art should - with the search for inspiration!  We will look at the work of a different artist: some well known and influential, some local, and some who may never become famous but are nonetheless pushing art outside of the stale galleries and boundaries of museums and into the natural world.  Drawing inspiration from these men and women who lived with passionate dedication to their ideas, we will then travel to different locations around Santa Cruz and make our own art.

Thanks for coming to our blog!  This is our opportunity to stay connected with each other throughout the weeks, and to share the art we make with the world.  Feel free to leave comments and take inspiration.

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Art in Nature Calendar (Tentative):
January 12  Bonny Dune - Andy Goldsworthy, Natural Sculpture
January 19 Upper Campus - Ansel Adams, Nature Photography
January 26 Fall Creek - Leaf Prints
February 2 Waddell Creek - Gary Snyder, Poetry
February 9 Arboretum - Pine Needle Baskets
February 16 Capitola Beach - Drawing 1
February 23 Land of the Medicine Buddha - Mandalas
March 2 Wilder Ranch - Candle Making
March 9 Natural Bridges - Print Making
March 16 Henry Cowell - Drawing 2
March 23 Davenport Landing - Jewelry
March 30 Palm Beach - Bonfire

Week Six: Drawing 1

I was absent this week (cross-country skiing in king's canyon; don't feel sorry), but I hear that everyone visited an art gallery in Capitola Village for inspiration, then went to Capitola Beach to build forts out of driftwood, and finally headed to Seabright Beach to draw.  Nick was really impressed with the drawings that came out of that process.  Hope it was fun.  See you all next week!

(If anyone has any pictures of the day, feel free to upload them.  I'd love to see what went down!)

Week Five: Rainy Day

Today we avoided the deluge and played games at a local coffee shop.  To support our community of artists we then went to Andre's play (which Cayden helped in the production of) at the Louden Nelson Community Center.

Week Four: Pictures from Ken

Handmade Katana from redwood splinters the week before!

Week Four: Gary Snyder, Poetry

For week four we turned our artistic minds to nature poetry.  Armed with two anthologies from the poet laureate of deep ecology, Gary Snyder, we set off for a historic cabin at Wilder Ranch to find a dry place to write.  A contemporary of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Snyder excels at capturing moments and using his words to take readers on journeys through the Sierra Nevada foothills he calls home.  Before embarking on our own journeys through the present, we began by exercising our poetic minds with an observation and description game.  When we finished, we read a few of Snyder's poems for inspiration.  The rain was still holding off, so we chose individual sit spots outside each other's line of vision and wrote for 10 minutes.  One student wrote his poem using Snyder's anthology for a writer's table; I'm confident Snyder would have approved!

Week Three: Pictures from Ken

                                                    top of a fallen tree at Fall Creek