Enjoy creating experimental and abstract compositions inspired by your everyday surroundings in this recording.

Join Cornwall based artist Kitty Hillier in taking inspiration from her daily wanderings around the Cornish coastline for this morning webinar. Benefit from Kitty’s contemporary take on landscape and nature. An approach that has been attracting attention both locally and nationally.

The aim of the workshop is to seek inspiration from your everyday environment through a process of close observation, slow drawing and playful mark-making. Using all of your senses, Kitty will show you how to pay attention to the seasonal transitions, forgotten spaces and discarded objects. You will explore how universal shapes connect the natural and manmade environment around us, and how one informs the other.  

Looking at the work of various artists who took inspiration from the Cornish landscape including Eileen Agar, Wilhelmina Barns Graham, Barbara Hepworth and Sandra Blow, Kitty will explain how these artists distilled natural shapes and forms into their creative practice, and how you can use these artists’ works to inspire your own creative journey.

Kitty will then guide you, from our studio in St Ives, through a series of simple, intuitive mark-making exercises. Armed with a handful of sketches, you will then learn to distil your observations into abstract compositions by adding colour and texture to your drawings. Taking linear marks and finding abstract forms through ‘drawing’ with scissors, Kitty will help you to create intuitive and expressive abstract images inspired by the objects and landscape around you.  

This workshop will help you to find your own personal palette and visual vocabulary, encouraging you to experiment and loosen your approach to image making. Prior to watching the online class, you will be asked to collect objects from your immediate environment – be that city or countryside, woodland or coast – the aim of the exercise is to look at natural and manmade forms afresh.