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EMILY BALL AT SEAWHITE‍

CONTEMPORARY DRAWING AND PAINTING COURSES‍

HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

 Summer School 2024: In the Garden

Image: Emily and Katie painting collaboratively in the Seawhite Studio

Dear  ‍ ‍

‍From Monet to Matisse, many artists have been inspired by the motifs of the garden, revelling in the colours and sensory delights that they offer.  Looking at your own garden could tell you a lot about what you might desire in your paintings - full to the brim with vibrant colour, shaped with sharp edges, or layered and glazed with shimmering borders and golden grasses.  The garden is a symbol of abundance and a space for dreaming. Spending time in a garden is food for the soul.

If you would like guidance on how to approach this truly sensational, seasonal subject, join Emily and Katie for their online and in-person Summer Schools.  Entitled ‘In the Garden’  these courses  will guide you from quick studies to finished paintings, with Emily and Katie offering inventive approaches to encourage fresh ways of looking and creating images.

Drawing and painting from nature is a process of exploration and discovery, so to help you switch on all your senses – and become (as Emily would say) ‘Whiskers Alert!’ – for each course Katie will lead mindfulness meditations to really ground you in your surroundings before making work.

“You will be encouraged to walk through the space, spend some time finding a few places where you can just sit, observe how the light changes with every hour. Close your eyes and listen, to the plants, to the birds and the bees, to the surrounding space. Breathe, inhale the myriad of scents and smells, from the dank earth to the pungent rose.” ~ Katie ‍

 Image: ‍ painting study celebrating the colours and forms of nature (Emily Ball)

After sowing the seeds of creativity and  filling your studies with colour and sensory delight, you can then begin to grow your paintings in the studio: following your instincts, being bold when you want to, delicate where it’s needed. Think about how the garden itself was created, with love, experimentation, trial and error no doubt, a willingness to shift this, transplant that, cut back, prune, replant…. this is how you can approach your sketchbooks, studies, and paintings. 

Summer School 2024: In the Garden – choose from:‍

 The Online version of the course

takes place in June, providing you

with the option of taking inspiration from your own garden (or one of

your choice). 

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 The In-Person version of the course will be in July and includes two days on location at at Highdown Gardens  - an historic chalk garden near Worthing - followed by  three days at the Seawhite Studio.‍

Click on the image above and let Emily take you on a  walk around Highdown Gardens, so that you can soak up the atmosphere and become inspired by the theme of this year’s summer school‍.  And then read on for more information about the summer schools – as well as the chance to see Emily and Katie painting collaboratively for the first time ever!

Online Summer School 2024

 In the Garden

Course Dates June 24th -  27th (Monday - Thursday) 2024.

Online Course Time: 10am – 12.30pm tutored (self-directed study offline each afternoon)

£‍250

Image: student making studies in the garden during a course delivered by Katie at West Horsley Place

Sitting in the garden at the height of summer is heaven. Whether you have a beautiful garden of your own or you love to visit a garden for your inspiration, this course is a celebration of the abundance of the summer garden.In May and June the shoots and buds are urgently pushing forward, gathering pace. Spring melts into Summer and flowers become centre stage with their splashes of colour jostling for attention. Colours are luminous on the blousy petals of flowers, the bird song is shrill and excited, the shadows are deep, cool and inviting. To find a quiet, shady spot to sit, watch, listen, wonder and draw is the first part of this course. As you sit and make studies it gives you time to notice the foliage, the shapes of shadows and the dance of colour as your gaze meanders through the spaces.‍ 

Images: Emily and Katie delivering online tutorials for the Summer School‍

A month before the date of the live online sessions you will be sent a collection of short films that give you demonstrations of ways of working. These that will help you make lots of studies which you will need in preparation for the live classes.

Click on the image below to watch a short film that gives a flavour of what artists attending this year's summer school can expect:  

During the live online sessions Emily and Katie will show you how to unpack and select from your many studies and create expressive paintings that bring back the glorious riot of colours, patterns, mood and memories of being in the garden. In the afternoons you can choose to do more work on your own or just rest and await the next day's joyous gifts.‍

Image: ‍ painting study, Sheffield Park (Emily Ball)

For more information and to book your place, please click on the button below:‍‍

Garden Tales ~ Katie Sollohub

Image: Garden Tales, 2020 (Katie Sollohub)

"Garden Tales is one of my favourite paintings of recent years. Painted from the doors of my garden studio, looking out, it has transformed my tiny garden into a paradise - ah the magic of paint and colour and artistic license. Painted over a period of time, I was able to notice the flowers growing, the leaves changing colour, as well as the various birds and beasts visiting. It became the stuff of fairy tales. My own secret garden." ~ Katie‍

In Person Summer School 2024
In the Garden at Highdown, West Sussex

July 1st - 5th 2024 (Monday – Friday) 9:30am to 4.30pm 
(2 days in the garden making studies, 3 days at Seawhite Studio making paintings)

£‍550

Images:‍ Highdown Gardens, flora and foliage, making studies

This 5 day painting course takes its inspiration from the beautiful Highdown Garden near Worthing, a unique chalk garden on the Downs. This garden is both beautiful and remarkable. In the unlikely setting of a chalk pit the founders of the garden sourced plants from all over the world that would thrive in this habitat. It is a garden full of delights; mature trees and plants, winding pathways that lead to open spaces where you can sit and drink immersed in the sites sights, sounds and smells. These long summer days, following the summer solstice, are the perfect time to celebrate the colour and abundance of nature. The first two days of the course are spent in the garden making lots of studies capturing the experience of this peaceful and inspiring place. The rest of the week is spent at the Seawhite studio where ambitious and expressive paintings will be created using these studies and our memories of the place.

Image: painting study (Emily Ball)‍

 “For the studio based course Katie and I will be encouraging you to be painterly: to embrace and use the beautiful colours, textures and natural patterns that have inspired you from the gardens to make joyful and evocative paintings that bring the garden into the studio.” ~ Emily

 
In the spirit of doing just that, Emily and Katie filmed the making of an improvised, collaborative  large-scale garden painting.    After a morning drawing and observing the colours, sounds and sensations of being at Highdown Gardens, they returned to the Seawhite Studio and painted  together – freely and expressively -  using cheap acrylics on a roll of Fabriano cartridge paper stapled to the studio wall.  They painted like gardeners: growing the painting, pruning it, seeing what grew with what, what needed cutting out.

Click on the image below to watch the timelapse film on our YouTube channel:‍

For more information and to book your place on the course, please click on the button below:  ‍

Accessing the garden is easy. It is a short walk on flat ground from the carpark. All the paths in the garden are easy to navigate. There are benches dotted everywhere so that you can pause to sit and soak up the atmosphere and draw in comfort. Above the gardens is Highdown Hill; the gateway to the South Downs National Park.

Adjacent to the garden is a cafe, for light snacks, lunch and refreshments. As well as this, there is a pub, restaurant and hotel for those travelling from further afield, who might want to stay overnight or enjoy an evening meal and a sunset walk on the Downs. ‍‍

Image:‍  Drawings in the Garden (Katie at Sussex Praries Garden)

Whether it’s your own garden and you join us online or whether you come with us in person to Highdown Gardens near Worthing, it promises to be a riot of colour and an opportunity to grow. These courses could even inspire you to plant new things in your own garden, for next year’s garden paintings (Highdown Gardens sell plants from their nursery)…This could be the beginning of a lifelong project, as it was for Monet at Giverny.‍

"I am so grateful to have been part of the recent magic of the summer school. What you did was unpack the whole process of working outside on studies, bringing them into the studio and then how to put together a painting. You couldn’t have broken it down for us more or facilitated our creativity better." ~ Sophie Bartlett, course participant on previous Seawhite Studio Summer school.‍

www.emilyballatseawhite.co.uk‍ | Contact |  ‍Unsubscribe ‍