Artist Talk & Watercolour Workshop

Saturday 18 May 2024 with Charles Williams 10am - 1pm - Talk 2pm - 4.30pm - Workshop What do you do as a visual artist in the UK, at this historical moment? How do you make sense of it? I have had a thirty-plus year career, working as a visual artist, a painter, in the British Art scene. It hasn’t been especially remarkable, but I have consistently maintained my practice (although I feel uncomfortable about calling it that) and a studio and an exhibition schedule in all of that time. Like many artists, I have taught in Higher Education, but only for ten years. I am acutely aware of the different contexts in which artists find meaning and status, and I have never become resigned to or comfortable with any of them. I recently completed a PhD on the subject of my own work, in an attempt to understand it, and one of the things that emerged was an awareness of my engagement with certain paintings from the canon of Western art history. I will spend the morning talking about my research interest in Joseph Highmore’s painting Mr Oldham And His Friends, Annibale Carracci’s The Butcher's Shop and GD Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Nuovo, among others, in relation to the question ‘why aren’t art students taught to draw any more?’ This takes me into the potentially interesting territory of the role of the visual arts, and painting in particular, in contemporary culture, and what being a visual artist means. Later, I will extend the conversation to my own work and career, and I will talk about my PhD and what that meant to me. In the afternoon I will lead a workshop, using watercolour (did I mention that I am the President of the Royal Watercolour Society?) and gouache to explore ways of generating and developing images. My reading of Emil Nolde’s so-called ‘Forbidden Paintings’ is that they were made using a technique of making random marks on paper and developing the images he saw in them. It turns out that this is actually an ancient technique. Alexander Cozens (1717 – 1786), one of Britain’s great early watercolourists, in fact wrote a treatise on what he called ‘blotting’, a way of inventing Romantic landscapes in the studio. Before him, Leonardo recommends looking for landscape motifs in the lichen on walls, and even prehistoric cave paintings seem to be animal figures developed from suggestive shapes in the rock walls. This talk takes place at: North Yorks Art School 2-4 South Street Scarborough YO11 2BP Includes all materials, refreshments and lunch.