On 14th June a group of eleven society members met in London to see two exhibitions of art by Cedric Morris. Starting at the Philip Mould Gallery, on Pall Mall, to see the exhibition ‘Beyond the Garden Wall’ this featured paintings of his travels mainly around the Mediterranean, Mexico and England, we also met Philip Mould. Following lunch we travelled by taxi to The Garden Museum, to see the exhibition ‘Artist Plantsman’ which featured his plant portraits. Into taxis again to our restaurant before making our different ways home. Many thanks to Jane Edwards who organised the day.

Susan Christopher-Coulson came to our meeting on 17th June and gave us a fantastic workshop. For all and particularly those not familiar with working with coloured pencil the information that she passed on about the types of pencils and paper she uses and the practical help she gave was first class.

Exhibitions this summer

• Cedric Morris – two complementary exhibitions. Philip Mould Gallery, Pall Mall and The Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road. Both exhibitions are on until 22nd July.
• SBA Exhibition – Woburn Abbey, 23rd & 24th June
• RHS Plant and Botanical Art Fair – RHS Horticultural Halls 11th July 11am – 8pm and 12th July 11am – 6pm
• Kew Gardens, Shirley Sherwood Gallery until 16th September. The Florilegium – An exhibition of works illustrating the beauty and diversity of plants grown by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney. Also Works from the Shirley Sherwood Collection of native Australian and New Zealand plants.

‘Using photographic notes’ was the title of Martin’s workshop. We are very grateful to Martin for travelling down from Middlesbrough in snowy conditions, eleven members managed the dreadful road conditions in the West Midlands to attend.

Points from the workshop

• Take a lot of photographs of your subject.
• When photographing indoors use natural light from a window if possible, from the left to give shadows, use a white board behind the subject and use a tripod. Outdoors use a white board and tripod, it may not be possible to pick wild flowers.
• You need to see how all the structures fit and refer to a flora for the size of leaves, number of stamens etc. Your painting needs to be botanically correct.
• Measure all parts, including the size of leaves.
• Also record the the reverse of the flower, petals and leaf structures
• Do not paint/record distorted petals or leaves, you may have to merge two images to get a good painting.
• Beware of painting flowers or leaves that are drooping.
• Make colour notes from the plant, colour will not be accurate from printed photographs. sometimes you may need to use ‘Photoshop’ to whiten the background of the photo to get a more correct colour.

Members were then challenged to colour match and paint part of a red bromeliad.

Finally Martin took us through how he used photographs in his painting, in particular showing a painting of Rampion enlarged to many times its size but still in proportion. A thoroughly enjoyable and informative workshop.

Botanical Painting Workshop at Winterbourne House and Gardens with Jeni Neale, Saturday 28th April ‘Spring Flowers.

Enjoy a day of drawing and painting the delights of springtime from Winterbourne’s garden: flowering bulbs, emerging buds and beautiful Camelia. Concentrating on simple compositions, learn how to capture their form and vibrant colours in easy colour washes. Jeni will demonstrate drawing and painting methods at each stage and the limited numbers will allow for plenty of one-to-one tuition throughout the day.

For further information and bookings, please click on link: www.winterbourne.org.uk/whats-on/spring-flowers/