8 County Students Get a Summertime Feel for the Arts

For almost a month now, eight Ventura County students have been living in dormitories at Oakland’s Mills College and attending the California State Summer School for the Arts. This is how some of them spent their summer vacation:

* Working in ceramics, Pablo Weiss created an Amazonian chief, who sits naked on a couch, watching a nuclear bomb explode on television. The couch sits on a map of South America; the TV set, atop a miniature Aztec temple.

“So it’s kind of a metaphor for how Indians want couches and things these days,” Weiss said, “and how they may be oblivious” to the damage technology does to the natural world.

The program, Weiss said, gives them “intermittent theory--lectures and slide shows. But for the most part, we’re really cranking out the work, and getting our money’s worth.”

Stephanie Sunwoo, 16, who will be a junior at Oxnard High School this fall, took classes in photography, design and drawing, and video, learning to work with moving images and a 4-by-5-inch still camera for the first time.

“A lot of projects you can’t finish during class. You have to come after,” she said. On the nights she wasn’t coming in after class, there were on-campus film screenings to consider.

“ ‘Citizen Kane,’ or ‘The Fabulous Baker Boys,’ or ‘Doctor Strangelove’--they try to accommodate everybody’s tastes,” Sunwoo said. “Today is ‘Children of a Lesser God.’ ”

* Paul Disbrow, 17, of Simi Valley High School, studied visual arts--and was struck by the teachers’ attitudes.

“You can talk to them on a one-to-one basis and really feel equal,” he said. “They don’t say, ‘Well, that’s not quite what I had in mind.’ They let you do what you want to do, and I think that’s one of the most important things.”’

* “I made this saber-toothed tiger with armored stuff on it,” said Jeff Plamenig, a 17-year-old visual arts student from Simi Valley High School. “And I have this armored rider on it, and he’s holding on to a staff with a blade on the end. He has a helmet on, with horns on the top. I just thought it up.”

Plamenig took courses in ceramics, design, printmaking and drawing, along with an Issues in Art discussion group that met at 8 a.m.

“You really have to get up early around here,” Plamenig said.