What a great few days in Newlyn with Mark Spray of the Newlyn School of Art. In all seven artists turned up to experience the Cornish landscape and put it all down on paper and paint. Not the best of weather and the moors can be a trifle cold when it is 5 degrees and blowing a gale, but this was just the trigger we needed to commit something to paper. Great big pieces of paper (about a metre square) and fortunately really tough as it had to be weighed down with rocks to keep it on the ground and not get too fussy with a bit of rain on it!!
I have always been a bit unsure about trying to capture the wilds of nature, but this certainly freed up any inhibitions. I for one was pleasantly surprised to find just how expressive it all was when the results were viewed back in the studio on a very rainy Wednesday. We used this day to develop these sketches into some more studied work. It was like trying to re-live those moments in the wild and develop paintings from some of the ideas, forms, and colours that we had collected. It is really amazing what you can do with a lump of charcoal tied to one end of a stick and a 2” paintbrush on the other end! Plenty of black and white paint and handfuls of earth all give that ‘drawn in situ’ feel to your work.
The two large sketches mean a lot to me now I have lived a bit with them and I am going to try and mount then on some lightweight foam board with the hope of showing them later in and exhibition. There is a lot of work I can pull out these few days.
Here are some memories of the few days that we shared and will give some idea of what we all enjoyed.
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