After an eventful, busy and inspiring ten day retreat with the lovely group of participants, and our hosts Harrison and Katel from Perigord Retreats, I am enjoying some downtime before my next online course, Explore Abstracts I starts in October.
Along with our two dogs, Laika and Clemi, we have indulged in long walks through woodlands and alongside rivers and have been exploring quaint little medieval villages on day trips around Perigord.
I sketched on location on our day trips during the retreat, and these drawings are already inspiring larger paintings created in acrylic and mixed media (I’ll show you the outcomes in a future post).
In the 20 minute video at the top of this post, I’m rendering two of my sketchbook drawings that were started on a visit to Cirq-La-Popie using the colours from Week 38. You can also see how I turn a blind contour sketch of these medieval buildings into a coloured abstract drawing. I also show you some artwork outcomes from the retreat.
I’ll be back in Perigord, teaching on a retreat in 2027, join the priority mailing list to stay in the loop and get notifications of new dates.
Explore Abstracts I
Abstraction is important and can be applied to all art forms. The word means to separate or to withdraw something from something else. When it comes to drawing from life, I think of abstraction as a means to simplify and distill that what you see into a new creation, whilst retaining the essence of the object or view that inspired the drawing. Anyway, even though my paintings normally fall into the category of still life, landscape or floral, abstraction is an inherent part of the creative process for all of them.
In 2024 I developed Explore Abstracts I, a six week long course now available for the final time as a scheduled ‘live’ course with daily, easily digestible projects. The course runs from 6 October to 16 November with access to all course content until the end 2026 or longer if required. As a #coloricombo subscriber you can make use of a 15% discount, use the coupon code EXPLORE15 at checkout.
PS contributing Coloricombo subscribers are automatically entitled to a 25% discount on all of my listed courses including Explore Abstracts I.
