Cotswold Art Club

Welcome to the Cotswold Art Club

Membership is open to all artists both amateur and professional. The club gives support and encouragement to its members with a number of activities.

DEMONSTRATIONS

In April, Charlotte Aiken came to club to share and demonstrate her techniques with oils. Her abiding passion for clouds came across during the talk. She paints them realistically as well as using them to inform an abstract painting. As her oils paintings are layered, they take many months to complete, so we would only be able to share the journey for a very small section of the work. Charlotte likes to paint big, however the demonstration was restricted to the largest that could actually fit in her car.

The painting already had a layer of paint and imitation gold leaf.

She introduced us to some of her favorite colours including prussian blue, paynes grey, phalo blue and phalo green. The first part of the demonstration was adding a thin glaze with the paint and solvent and then wiping it back in areas. Adding in dark areas that corresponded to the shadows in her reference. The next layer was adding in white to some of the lighter areas and then back to dark. In between each she would wipe back areas, leaving beautiful shadows and highlights. Towards the end Charlotte also showed us how to add the white with linseed in specific areas.

Charlotte also demonstrated a variety of brushes to apply the painting and cloths and sponges to wipe it back, always working in circles.

Charlotte explained the ‘fat’ layers, that the idea was for the initial layers to be very thin and translucent with the solvent and then adding more oil each time until the last layer would fat and opaque.

Website

Jean began the talk with a history of Chinese art dating back to Neolithic times with the discovery of pottery and early ceramics.
The Chinese invented paper and silk in about 1000AD. Jean showed us an Inkstone which is a shallow black container made of stone and also an Inkstick which looks like an ornate domino and made from pine soot and glue. Shavings from the Inkstick are mixed with water in the Instone creating fluid black ink.
We were given paint brushes of varying sizes to pass around made from the hair of wolves, weasels, horses and sheep. We also were shown three different textures of paper. Jean advised to put a cloth or newspaper under the paper as it is very porous.
On this occasion she used Xuan paper and Marie’s Chinese watercolours. She started by drawing the outline of flowers with black ink holding the pen like throwing a dart and colouring the centre in red and orange.
The next painting was a pink magnolia. When she mixed the red and white to make pink, she made sure the brush was filled with paint and the tip of the paintbrush remained in the red area of the palette creating natural shading on the petals. Jean continued to add the leaves and stalks.
Her final painting was bamboo sticks. She used the thickness of the brush to make several lines interrupted by spaces which she joined by arrow shaped marks and then added the new stems, finishing the painting with the addition of leaves and birds

NEXT DEMONSTRATION

Join us on 15th Feburary when Pattern in Nature will be the subject of the demonstration by Jackie Garner using Acrylics
More information about this years schedule is on Club Meeting Page