Connected to Nature

Course dates: April 23rd - 24th 2019 (Tuesday - Wednesday)

This is a two-day drawing course that will introduce different ways of engaging with and connecting to nature.  These include walking, guided meditation and gathering samples from the nearby landscape.  The course is an opportunity to: be more present in nature; notice the passing of time / seasonal changes; and increase your awareness of how to connect with nature using physical sensations such as touch, sound and smell. The course will begin with journeys out into nature in order to collect materials and visual information which can then form a nature-laboratory back at the studio.  We will be putting nature under the magnifying glass to create close-up studies using a range of drawing materials (including earth and natural pigments).

Working in series, you will be observing how change, sensation, different touch, and time passing can become the subject, almost like a narrative, rather than all of this going into one final piece of work. The series is the work.

Lots of artists have worked small and in series for practical and investigative reasons.  We will be looking at John Virtue’s Tree drawings and Alvaro Petritoli’s Fragment series as examples, as well as Katie’s own daily practice of small paintings from her kitchen table. We will also look at paintings by Terry Winters and Per Kirkeby as examples of artists working from nature.