Last Sunday saw the second running of Warwickshire Open Studios' Plein Air event. Its a chance for local artists to paint outdoors in a beautiful venue - Jephson Gardens in Leamington Spa (recently given a 'Favourite Local Park[' award by Fields In Trust.
The premise is simple - pay a small charge to sit with around 100 other artist to create art in whatever medium you want, in whatever style you want of whatever subject you want. Visitors can see the work in progress and talk to the artists. For artists its a great opportunity to watch others at work and meet some of the people you know from social media.
The event is open to all and so you get a huge range of ages and levels of experience but for all the objective, to my mind at least, is to use the communion with your surroundings in some way. Ideally you can produce something which shows "I was there". Its not easy because those surroundings are moving, the light is shifting and at times it can be cold and windy which creates it's own challenges.
Subjects are varied. The managed gardens are stunning and so there are plenty of beautiful flowers and plants to study, There are interesting buildings too - from the modern Glasshouse to the Romantic Jephson Memorial. The river flows slowly past, there is a bridge over it and some lakes and fountains. On Sunday the weather forecast was pretty patchy and so the emphasis was on choosing a spot with some shelter but the mature trees dotted across the park make that achievable.
As ever, the day flew by. I chose a spot looking at the fountains over some huge foliage leaves and had a lovely time slowly getting a watercolour to 'finished'. At the end of the day there is a sall exhibition where the finished pieces are displayed. It really highlights the variety of opportunities here. On Sunday there were paitnings in oil, watercolour and acrylic, pen and ink, photography, collage, needlework, prints, sculpture, and ceramics. And the standard is excellent - a good number of the works sell on the day.
This painting by Angela Webb won Best In Show. I think this painting a clever handling of the weather conditions on the day and made great use of the available light. The sky was pretty dull most of the day and so I like the idea of eliminating it and playing with the light on the foliage and on the water instead. The composition with the framing using the leaves is nice and the treatment of the water is beautiful. The fountains can be overdone and I think they are just right in this and the reflection add to the depth in the picture. Its one of those paintings where the time available (maximum 6 hours) doesn't come into the equation - just a nice piece of art in its own right.
The Leamington Studio Artists Prize was won by Kenilworth's own Kevin Alexander. Again he did a great job by limiting his palette to reflect the conditions and again he has a great composition with the distant focus of the blue bridge framed by the foliage. I love the colour of the blue bridge and the flecks of orange in the bottom right and top left. There is a lovely movement that Kevin creates with his application of paint - the lines, dots and blobs - in this case they work well to suggest the sinlight catching on the leaves and reeds. The strong black tree across the top works well for me too and the flat calm of the river sets up the bridge behind well. I have cropped the photograph like this because I also liked Katy Walden's view of the houses over the River Leam too - a view I've often thought about painting.
Clare Henley is very good at this Plein Air thing. I really like her spare style with a fresh colour palette - particularly the blues and blue-greys which just add lovely tone and shadow. I saw that Clare was working right up until cut off point and so she captured the best weather of the day - a gamble which really paid off. I am surprised more artists don't work around this area of the park - maybe the number of people using the cafe means its difficult to get a good view
Congratulations to Warwickshire Open Studios for a well-organised, very inclusive event. Hopefully we'll do it all over again in 2023.
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