Come to the SAW Single-Year Intensive 2019-2020
Dear friends,
Every year, we welcome a new cohort of students for a year-long intense dive into making and studying comics. We’ve done it since 2012.
Each year it’s different, and each year it’s been wonderful.
We have students as young as 18, and so far, as old as 70.
We’ve had botanists, builders, art students, PhDs, college drop-outs, , men, women, non-binary- all sorts, basically, and we’re proud of the experience they’ve had here.
And we’re accepting applications for 2019-2020.
I’ve been reading articles about schools costing more than $50,000 a year, which of course, is kinda nuts.
What most people want is to be seen, heard, listened to, pushed, taught, and a community of other learners. If you want the most certain career in the animation industry, you go to Cal Arts and spend the 50k a year (I know people who have done it, and they’re happy.)
But if you want a year to focus, learn, push yourself and be pushed. If you want a year to be surprised, both by what your instructors are revealing, and also what are you are creating yourself, then you go to an art school where people matter.
Our school changes lives. Even in a year, even in our slightly run-down building.
Maybe the computers aren’t as fast, maybe the printer needs to be turned on and off again, but the learning at SAW is real, the growth is real, the potential for your transformation is real.
Click here to send us an email and ask more.
Click to view our application.
Or read our booklet, What Do I Tell My Loved Ones, When I Tell Them I Want To Go To A Community-Run Art School?
I created SAW to be the school I could never find. When I was a young artist in the late 80s, I wanted structure, schooling and mentorship, but couldn’t find it in the higher education art schools. Those felt like factories for a different kind of person than I was. What I wanted was a little weird.Who goes to school to tell personal stories in comics in 1987?
For 20 years I studied what it meant to be a cartoonist. I read the best work I could, and wrote, drew and published the best work I could, I met as many people in the artform and industry as I could, and ultimately wound up teaching at the same art school I dropped out of 15 years earlier.
In 2011, I moved to Gainesville and founded this little school. I left New York because I didn’t like the commercial nature of it. I wanted to go deeper into my art practice. I wanted to help others become artists.
When you come to SAW, you get an experience living among artists, in a supportive town, among other students who have come to SAW and haven’t left, and among teachers who are working every day,
Our board members include educators, many past students, an activist for the Florida Springs and may others who see SAW as a way of making the world a better place.
My belief had been and continues to be that art school should train us to be the people we want to be. We use our art training to bring ourselves into existence. A good art teacher teaches us to access our power, and to also to raise our expectations of what we can see and do. A good community keeps us accountable.
Hope to see you here!
Tom Hart, 2019