EMILY BALL AT SEAWHITE | CONTEMPORARY DRAWING AND PAINTING COURSES |
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NICK BODIMEADE
| Face-to-Face Course with Nick Bodimeade
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Images: Seawhite Studio Images, Emily Ball, Waterlily Painting, Nick Bodimeade
Dear Visitor This newsletter is all about artist and tutor Nick Bodimeade. We’ll be finding out about Nick’s own painting practice: what inspires him, the projects he’s working on and how these inform his teaching. And we’ll also be putting the spotlight on Nick’s Face-to-Face course at the Seawhite Studio: outlining their content and structure, and hearing the benefits of attending the courses from existing students.
The Creative Painting Space and the Painting Surgeries provide artists with the opportunity to boost their independent art practice with regular sessions at the Seawhite studio. With stunning lectures and lively discussions, Nick introduces students to new artists, new artworks and new ideas. Through his gentle yet rigorous mentoring approach , he provides credible unpacked processes which students can explore further in their own work.
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Image: students working in the Seawhite Studio, Emily Ball
Meeting for one day once a month, the Painting Surgeries are for artists who have an existing independent practice. With well planned presentations kick-starting the sessions, and one-to-one tutorials taking place in front of developing work, the Painting Surgeries offer practical strategies to move work forward within a rich community of dedicated artists. It can be a lonely business making paintings and the Painting Surgeries are a powerful support network for the students who attend them. |
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“I often go to the Painting Surgery feeling stuck, but Nick’s teaching provides richness and depth…In terms of my practice, he has the ability to know the right moment to make suggestions to push me on so that by the end of the day, I’m feeling excited by new directions in my work.” Sally Meyer
Image: students working in the Seawhite Studio, Emily Ball |
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The Creative Painting Space is for artists who want a kick-start that ensures that they are able to sustain their own independent practice. The sessions are focused on one-to-one tutorials that seek to improve production, pace and help artists to find ways to become unstuck. Nick provides practical advice on all aspects of being a painter from materials and processes to presentation and dealing with putting work in the public domain. He also provide a supportive critical eye and helps individuals make personal critical decisions about the development of their practice.
With the Creative Painting Space, you do not have to commit to a whole term of sessions, you are able to select which of the three-day blocks you would like to attend. So you can pick and choose when to join depending on your schedule and when you need that artistic boost! |
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Nick Bodimeade: Projects & Paintings
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The images I’ve selected for this newsletter span a period from early in the first lockdown up until the present.
It has been a period of much experimentation and pushing at the boundaries of my practice - I don’t think I have ever felt so engaged. |
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In March 2020 the day to day world shrank to what was accessible by foot and on bike. Home territory. The local, already known intimately but viewed with a new intensity. As part of my explorations walking the dog and cycling on the downs - taking my lead from the writer Roger Deacon - I slept out in bivvy bag or tent one night each month of the year, enjoying viewing the landscape as a place of shelter and habitation. I decided to focus my practice and my research more explicitly on the landscape around me whilst maintain my interest in the role of photography and abstract painting. |
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Image: Bank & Ditch drawings., Nick Bodimeade
Early in the Pandemic when Mathew Burrows brilliantly set up the Artists Support Pledge (ASP) I saw it as an opportunity to intensify a project titled ‘Bank and Ditch’ that I had just started, which was to make small paintings on board that recorded my daily travels as the landscape moved from winter into spring and beyond. I got into the routine of going out taking lots of photographs returning to the studio, investigating their potential, through quick diagrammatic drawings with a black felt pen, and then making small fluid, wet into wet, oil paintings. ASP went from no where to becoming a significant force within a limited sector of the arts community. I made hundreds of drawings and well over a hundred small paintings. It helped me financially at a difficult time but more importantly enabled me to explore, develop and produce a body of experimental research that still informs what I am doing and will do. It also enabled me to connect with and collect the work of some terrific painters. I would like to thank all those in the Seawhite Studio community who supported ASP by buying work.
Images: Bank & Ditch photograph and paintings, Nick Bodimeade
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Image: Woodweave large canvas, Nick Bodimeade
At the same time I was working on the small [22x26cm] paintings on board I was making large diptychs up to 240cm wide of the windblown trees in local woods. I was fascinated by how these trees knocked down in the big storm of 87 had regrown vertically from the horizontal in some places forming woven impenetrable barriers, like massive laid hedges. Reading The Hidden life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben and Merlin Shedrake’s Entangled life put the parralells between tree and fungal communities and our own biological connections and challenges into perspective. Some of these are currently on show at the Campden Gallery. Chipping Camden. I will be having a solo show there in the Autumn.
Image: studio with Woodweave series, Nick Bodimeade |
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Images: photograph, drawings and painting of Waterlilies, Nick Bodimeade
I live beside the River Ouse, and walking along one of its tributaries, The Bevern, I found a patch of waterlilies. I have always felt that Monet’s waterlily paintings are the most extraordinary explorations of surface, illusionary space and picture plane and that they are key to the development of abstract painting and central to the core of my own interest in the relationship between representation and abstraction, or how the observable world can be turned into painting. So taking my courage in both hands jumped in. I had a couple of tutorials with the great painter John Walker when I was a student in the 70s and I shamelessly used what I gleaned from his Ikon Gallery retrospective to cross fertilise with Monet and Alex Katz to help me with the resulting series. Some of this work will be on show at a studio show I will be having in July.
Image: waterlily paintings, Nick Bodimeade |
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Current Work: sunsets and simple bold paintings |
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This sunset photograph of the downs was taken from the floodplain by the house, looking towards Brighton. It has always felt like I was looking at the town on fire, so I was intrigued to find that an area of the downs where I cycle regularly had been the site of a major military exercise in 1942. |
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Waterlilies and sunsets are painting cliches that I would have normally steered clear of, but I feel emboldened by the fact of them being part of my local and lived experience and their potential to make the kind of painterly abstractions I’m after.
Images: downs paintings, Nick Bodimeade |
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Previously I had made some small paintings of the downs reduced to horizontal stripes, with a concentration on colour, interval and material and I used these as a starting point for the current series of works on paper and the large canvases I am working on. Simple, bold paintings where the flatness and physicality operate in tension with the non perspectival illusionary space. |
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Alongside this studio activity I have been rethinking my teaching practice looking for ways in which my interests in lansdscape and its mediation through photography, drawing and paint can usefully be part of my my practical courses The students on the course have a huge knowledge and experience of art as both producers and consumers so during our discussions, I feel both challenged and supported. I feel there is a collaborative enterprise between the artists I tutor and myself which hopefully enables new work, approaches and ideas for both parties. |
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