
St Ives in Watercolour
Fri 19 - Sun 21 Sep - 3 days
David Webb
Join artist David Webb for this exploration through the streets and thoroughfares of St Ives. Working in watercolour, learn how to capture the character of this unique location.
Reveal a fresh and immediate approach to watercolour, emulating Turner’s rapidly made and highly expressive studies, known as colour “beginnings”. Create vibrant seascapes that evoke the boundlessness of sea and sky.
Explore techniques to capture the elemental power of the sea, inspired by JMW Turner, the pre-eminent painter of water. His rapidly made and highly expressive studies, known as colour “beginnings”, reveal fresh and immediate approaches to using watercolour. Learn to create vibrant watercolours, denote the sky, sea and beach, and animate and transform unadulterated colour into a boundless seascape.
Turner’s subject was light itself, reducing the landscape to its simplest forms to create a fusion of elements. Adopting a bold approach to using watercolour, like Turner, you will work on different scales, using different coloured papers and developing a minimalist style so forms are reduced to the barest description of sea and sky.
This way of working will feel like an approach to abstraction, although this concept was not understood or promoted in the nineteenth century, even by Turner who was renowned for his experimental nature. For Turner this was a means of training his eye, developing his imagination and thinking about landscape in pure colour, whilst gathering raw material to inform his studio paintings.
Explore this liberating approach to watercolour, working both inside and outside the studio. Move your approach away from a realistic depiction of a location, and instead explore relationships between the forces of nature and learn to harness the dynamic medium of watercolour painting.
Our studios are fully equipped and we provide you with all the materials you need for your course. However, if you have a favourite set of brushes or any specialist materials that you would prefer to use, please bring them with you.
The first day starts at 10am and finishes at 4.30pm, please aim to arrive ten to fifteen minutes before the start time.
All course days after that start at 9.30am and finish at 4pm and there will be an hour for lunch. There are plenty of nearby places to eat and we will serve tea and coffee at break times during the day.