Rick Johnson Emeritus Professor, Lamar Dodd School of Art Emeritus Director, UGA Cortona
My love affair with Cortona began in 1974 when I exited the bus in Piazza Garibaldi on the University of Georgia’s fifth Summer Studies Abroad Program ... a graduate student studying printmaking and photography. When hired by UGA as a professor in 1979, my greatest hope was that I could return to that enchanting Tuscan hill town and teach. Little did I know then that I would be back at least thrice in each of the next four decades and end my academic career with five years as the director of the program. Truthfully I was and am still more a student when I live inside these walls as each day brings a new learning experience. This golden anniversary means so much to so many adopted Americans; none more than I. Cortona was and is a life lived in the ultimate paradox: engulfed in the old yet everything is new! Being surrounded by the millennia of architecture, the arriving students are immediately stunned by an awareness of the newness of their country left behind ... across the Atlantic. They put aside their automobiles and televisions and often their ubiquitous laptops and cell phones and savor the richness of being a seemingly essential part of their environment. Art seems to mean more when you live inside it. I cannot get around the cliché, “This program changed my life in every positive way”! It is often said and always true. When I look back upon my fifty years of studio work, nearly all of it has roots in the iconography of Italian art. My closest friends are those with whom I have walked the vicoli of Italy. In the Georgia evenings my guests are served the food and wine of Italy leading toward conversations where friendship becomes family. We learned this in Italy too. My life, yes my soul, will be eternally grateful for the guidance and kindness shown me by the town of Cortona and her people and I know that fifty years of former students and faculty would say ditto!
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BACI FROM CORTONA