Emily Ball

7th - 9th May

£465

A Fistful of Flowers - Expressive Painting of Flowers

This intensive 3 day course will be an exploration into what it is like to make paintings of flowers that really embrace their extraordinary physicality and characters. As the title of the course suggests Nature can be touched, held, explored and brought close to us; rather than kept at a distance, idealised, pretty and conventional. Students will explore using the exciting qualities of paint: colour, surface, texture, layering and gesture to celebrate the wonder of flowers.

Everyone will have their own bunches of flowers in their space. These could be brought from your own garden, picked from the hegderows and given by Emily. Over the 3 days she will demonstrate ways of handling paint that give the sculptural and tactile qualities of the subject, as well as breaking down the stages of building the image. Working in a series of 3 or 4 paintings, going and back and forth between the paintings, will help each artist to explore the development of an image and gain confidence in changing, layering and pushing into the paintings to find the flowers.

Artists to inspire: Miranda Bolton, Bonnard, Cy Twombly, Phoebe Unwin, Patrick Heron, Tal R, Matisse, Joan Eardley, Ivon Hitchens, Soutine, Winifred Nicholson.

Lunches and refreshments included. Days run from 10am to 4pm (ish).

About Emily

She is a painter, tutor and author. She strives to be a poet in paint, pushing further into the expressive possibilities of translating sensation and experience into a painted visual language. She has been teaching for over 30 years and loves to create a space where artists can be focused and fearless as they explore and gain the confidence to find their personal language in paint.

She graduated from Exeter College of Art in 1989 with a BA in Fine Art Painting and completed her MA in painting from The Surrey Institute of Art & Design, Farnham in 1999. She has exhibited at the RA Summer Exhibition and was a prize winner at the National Open Art Exhibition. In 2009 she published her first book ‘Drawing and Painting People – A Fresh Approach (reviewed by Matthew Collings). In 2012 her second book was published 'Emily Ball – Painting'.

She is director of her Painting School 'Emily Ball at Seawhite' and also travels nationally and internationally to teach painting courses. In 2019 she was invited on a cultural exchange to China, with 7 other British Artists, where she made paintings and was given the opportunity to explore Chinese culture, landscape and painting. In 2021 her drawing 'Self Portrait as a 'Confident Woman' was selected and toured in the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize exhibition.

Currently she is working on a new body of work called 'Longing and Sweet Sadness' which explores her connection to her childhood home, memories and the feeling of being in the woods behind her parents house.

“As I paint and draw I am not searching to paint the view but instead exploring a language in paint that could give visual metaphors for the beauty, impermanence and rawness of Nature. I am reminded that all my senses are vital to inform my response; the movement of my body as I walk, the smell and feel of the earth under my feet. The sound of birdsong, the discomfort of working outside, the quiet space for reverie. I cluster marks, distress, mop, edit, knot, caress and balance between order and chaos in each painting. Each time it brings my attention to the particular; gentle paper clatter of leaves falling, piercing slats of amber light; luminous, looming, dimming, fading, draining away. The sap falling and rising, sleeping and waking; revealing the bare bones of the woodland weave.”

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