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July 25th, 2008
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Roughing it up south Bohemian style

Unique camp returns for another fun summer romp

By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
March 26th, 2008 issue

ArtMill campers can enjoy a variety of fun, weeklong activities, from painting classes to swimming lessons and canoeing to yoga and field trips.
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ArtMill offers a little something for everyone. Students can choose to stay for either one or two weeks this July.
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After a brief hiatus last year, ArtMill, a popular summer camp that focuses on nature and the environment, is back, and it looks better than ever.
ArtMill was started in 2005 by American artist Barbara Benish and her Czech husband Petr Kalný, and is based at their expansive farm residence in Červený mlýn, a small south Bohemian township near the Šumava Mountains.
This unique camp for children ages 6 to 16 “is a way of sharing the place and passing on our ideals about sustainability, creativity and beauty to the next generation of international citizens,” Benish explains. The whole idea “came naturally out of my love of teaching and love of children.”
While ArtMill is intended for children who speak at least a little English, there is translation help available. Campers can also sign up for daily English, Spanish or German lessons.
But art, as Benish is quick to point out, is a universal language and the camp’s primary focus. Benish has been a professional artist for 25 years. Students will have the opportunity to take daily classes with her in her studio, including painting and sculpture work, using stone, wood and nontraditional materials to construct objects based on natural forms.
Benish will also lead a group on organic gardening and farming with a focus on herbs and their flavors, uses, myths and legends.
Other local and visiting artists will be on hand during each one-week session to offer their expertise and knowledge to the kids.
Benish’s husband is an architect, who, along with Khoi Vo, a family friend and a professor of architecture and design in California, will teach classes and oversee workshops to help kids build a model village.
“The focus of my class [in the past was] about community and the parts that come together to make a whole,” Vo says.  “I believe this year we will work on furniture and what role that plays in the realm of human scale and domesticity. The aim is to deal with proportions, function and aesthetics. We will use drawings to investigate, and then build models.”
This summer’s special guest artist-in-residence will be “fabs,” an international art-collective group based in Warsaw. The thought behind inviting special artists-in-residence to the camp, Benish says, is to introduce children to professional artists, so they can see them working. There is a studio and exhibition space provided to the visiting artists.  
Benish is not quite sure what to expect from “fabs.” In fact, the group is under no pressure to do anything at all. Two years ago, the camp’s artist-in-residence ended up building a makeshift raft for himself and lived most of the days and nights out on a nearby lake, making detailed sketches of the water’s surface and visited only by his wife for daily deliveries of food and water, Benish recalls, noting that the children followed the artist’s antics or artistic activities with binoculars.
Such behavior isn’t at all strange to Uyanga Ganbold, a 10-year-old from Prague and former ArtMill camper.
“The adults are acting like they are kids, on the inside. They are feeling like kids, and the kids are really treated special at the camp,” she says.    
ArtMill is not confined to Benish’s renovated 500-year-old mill and adjoining farmland. Many of the activities and projects extend out into the surrounding community. For instance, the lake, just across the road from the mill, is used for swimming lessons and daily canoe trips. And the newly remodeled grammar school, which is also just a short walk from the camp, houses all ArtMill students and staff and includes a staffed kitchen, cafeteria and access to an indoor gym.  
And there are field trips to a nearby castle — Rábí, a renovated 12th- century fortress — and the Horažďovice museum, which is a former Kinský family chateau and about a 15-kilometer drive from the camp. Benish has also recently opened a gallery for contemporary art, called Califia, which is close to the museum.  Additionally, the camp organizes regular hiking trips and horse-riding in the hills and agricultural fields.
While breakfast and dinner are served in the cafeteria, lunches are served outdoors at ArtMill, and the children help to collect ingredients such as fresh eggs from the chickens, picking tomatoes, carrots and heads of lettuce from the organic garden. They sometimes also collect flowers and herbs for daily spices from the hills. They can even milk the goat, but mostly, the animals are there to play with and include sheep, ponies, birds, dogs, cats, and rabbits.
“It was the first time that I really loved horse-riding in such nice nature, and there are also many other great activities,” Uyanga, the former camper, says.
For more fun and exercise, ArtMill also hosts dance classes including ballet, hip hop, jazz dance and rhythm. There are also music lessons, theater workshops and yoga for kids.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at specialsection@praguepost.com


Other articles in Schools & Education (26/03/2008):

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