Adult Workshop | Achieving Soul in Your Painting
£40
[ Workshop )
Join Sussex Landscape artist Emma Jamison for an immersive workshop
This artist-led workshop will be run by Emma Jamison, whose work is currently hanging in our Sussex Landscape exhibition. The workshop aims to help you loosen up in your artistic practice, showing you how to keep your work fresh and avoid it looking overworked.
Emma will show you how, when you become less attached to your painting, you can achieve a more authentic result. She will demonstrate when you overwork an area, or repair it, it can start to have a “deadness” to it. Her aim is for you to learn how to avoid this and for your work to really mean something to you. She will explain how adding and subtracting layers will help you keep the surface plane raw and simplified.
Emma Jamison’s work Petworth Park I is currently on display as part of our Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water exhibition.
Structure of the workshop
During the workshop you will work from a drawing or photograph of a landscape that you know well. Please come with a few poignant colours in mind that you like working with, or that the landscape represents to you, in your memory of that place. We will start working with charcoal drawing out the image, so it looks real and then you will move on to simplify it, playing with colour introducing tones and developing the overall surface. This will be achieved by subtracting or using paint to mask a section, whilst working on rough edged scraps of canvas.
Throughout the practical session we will stop at intervals to share our work and at the end will consider if the colours in your composition are balanced, if your eye leads around the whole painting and whether it has a freshness and vitality to it. We will work together to suggest ways of remedying the work if this sense of feeling alive is lacking.
At the end Emma will give you a tour through the Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water exhibition.
Artist bio - Emma Jamison
Emma Jamison was born, and lives, in rural West Sussex, at the foot of the South Downs, close to Petworth. Jamison’s landscape paintings are inspired by ancient woodlands, specifically of places she knows well. She uses oil and acrylic, on canvas or board, often working to a very large scale.
“I attempt to capture the essence of my surroundings. I start with charcoal sketches on paper, outside, to get a feel for what I am seeing. I find it helps me to get to know it well. I have an emotional connection with a place, and that is what draws me in. There is a depth that I want to draw out, to capture. There is something in it, a story, even a history, that when I walk through the place, I am gripped and held by the atmosphere it conveys. It is there, you don’t forget it.”
During the last few years she has mainly been focusing on capturing the woodlands of Sussex, (exploring different pockets of the local landscape such as the chalk realms, the sweet chestnut coppices, the pines, the heathlands, the yew trees, beech and mixed broad leafed woodlands from which this Petworth Park series stems, interspersed with the odd trip to Pembrokeshire and destinations further afield such as Northern Spain, and most recently, Iceland. She has an intimate knowledge of the woodland of this area around Petworth, not least in her case as a result of having been employed as a coppicer.
Jamison’s works take the viewer through many landscapes, using many colours and techniques from surrealism to the semi-abstract, whilst all the time she is gaining her “visual voice” and developing her artistic identity.
When painting, Jamison aims “to lay down in paint a feeling, capturing the glow, the soul of the place, onto her canvas”.
