A lovely workshop at the studio today, with a full house to kick off the autumn term. A different way of painting for me, mixing up the traditional order of laying down colours in order to 'let go' of it a little more.
We started with a loose, watery wash of colour on the background after a great deal of discussion about paper and surfaces, playing with salt and clingfilm to suit our tastes. Only when this was dry did we start constructing our subject matter with a few loose pencil lines, adding a second layer of washes over this to give a vague sense of where our colour was going to occur. To spice things up at this stage, we included metallics in the form of inks or powders to our washes, only then pulling it together with darks to give the definition.
This is always a tricky class to teach as some gravitate to this type of painting and others take a little longer to get used to letting go of the precision. I think though, that everyone agreed that in order for the pieces to be successful, they needed to adopt the 'less is more' principle - easy to say and not so easy to do! Have any of you out there ever experienced this? Let me know won't you...

The only useful blog....

...is one that the artist remembers to update!
As usual, my life at the studio has been taken over with teaching and planning the 2017 classes and therefore, this blog has become seriously neglected. A small summer spring clean of admin should help now though and I will attempt to pass on more information through this site.
So have you all had an artistic summer? What have you all been up to? Let me know what artistic discoveries or experiments you have found won't you? I always love to hear from you as sending this blog out in to the ether is surreal at the best of times.
Personally, I have been experimenting with fabrics and trying to introduce new colours in to my palette rather than falling back on the old favourites. I'll let you know how I get on in due course. In the meantime, my 2017 class brochure launches on the 1st September and I am looking forward to chatting to you all about it.
Until we read again......

My talented husband

To coincide with my Highcliffe exhibition, today we ran a workshop at the studio showing how my beautiful picture frames are made by my husband Richard. When we first met I taught him how to picture frame, although not much tuition was needed as he was already very practical and this has now grown as part of the many services we offer at my studio.
What he hadn't allowed for, was that one day I might ask him to pass that knowledge on to anyone who might be interested and so this workshop was born.

It was important today to pass on the amount of work that goes in to picture framing and the hours that it takes to compliment the art work. Richard goes further by also reclaiming wood for the mouldings as I prefer natural woods such as oak and cherry, and profiles them in to lengths that can be used to show off the subjects that I choose to paint.

I don't think people were prepared for the amount of accurate maths that's involved either, as Richard showed how to calculate the dimensions of a mount and cut clean bevels on our mount cutter before demonstrating how to prepare work for a browser or to fit in to a ready made frame.

However, everyone went home with greater knowledge of what is required to finish off the hard work that goes in to creating a work of art and many were able to cut their own mounts, impressed at how much better their paintings looked after framing.

I think Richard surprised himself a little too, it wasn't obvious that he hadn't taught before and many of the class remarked on how he shared his knowledge with ease. Now to teach him how to paint...