Life Drawing

The life drawing evening was quite successful. The sitters, shown below in order, sat for ten minutes except for Stew who sat for twenty minutes because it was so hard to capture his natural aura, or was it because he had a guitar? 

We were also visited by Lana and Bryany who hopefully will become members.

Glenys Alexander

       

Ken Lilley

Dave Colman

Frank Bingley

Stew Levy

Bryany

Glenys  Lana  Lynda Eleanor Bryany

An evening with our President - 'Frank'.

 Scenes and characters of Market Harborough

A talk by Franklyn J Scott, alternatively known to us as ‘Frank,’ our club President. 

As a child Frank was inspired by a TV program called Adrian Hill’s Sunday morning sketch club. He entered a pencil sketch of a junk shop and he won first prize. This inspired him to study art. Educated in Leicester at Gateway School, and then the attached college of art. He gained a degree in graphic design. His first job involved printing where he worked in a studio in Oxford Street. He moved on to be a designer in Syston, display manager for North Eastern Gas, teacher in Oadby, to running his own sign writing business and finally to date a free lance artist.

On a his return from Australia, he decided to do a series of pictures of Market Harborough. In the painting of the old grammar school and church you will notice the shadow on the TSB wall is wrong with the time on the church clock, this was the start of deliberate mistakes in all the following Market Harborough paintings. Jim Divine carries a Tesco shopping bag, Jim never shopped in Tesco! Eric Waterfield's bicycle appears in every picture, certainly Frank knows all the local characters idiosyncrasies and evan included Ali Bunce’s foot in one picture! Richard Martin (Martin’s pet shop) approached Frank to paint the picture of Church Street. A print of one of these was presented to a visiting dignitary and now hangs in the Whitehouse in America. These paintings  are evidence of how Market Harborough has changed since the 1990’s.

This is only one small aspect of Franks work, scenes of Market Harborough, along with landscape paintings and night scenes can be found on his website www.fjscott.co.uk/

Thank you Frank for such an interesting and informative evening.

2016, public vote for the top 4 paintings

This year the public chose 4 favourite paintings.

The first was Alan Walkers painting of, 'Whitby.'

The second was Lynda Talbott's painting of the, 'Aquarium'.

Joint third place, was Lynda Talbot's painting called 'Gone Fishing', and Bob Morley's painting,  'Caenwych Farm'.

Photographs of the Oct 2016 Exhibition and an Invitation

Ken Lilley



Jane Palmer, Lynda Talbott and Glenys Alexander



Visitors



Visitor Charlie Watts from Yelvertoft Art Club

 


Chris Bent and Kate Ruse

admiring Frank's painting
http://christopherbent.wixsite.com/artist
 

Chris is a lecturer in art at De Montfort University and is also on the council of Leicester Society of Artists http://www.leicestersocietyofartists.co.uk/  and has been kind enough to have invited our art club members to their Preview Invitation Annual Exhibition Thursday 3 November 6.30 - 8.30pm

I will print out a number of the invites for the October 28th Oct and 25th Nov meetings. If anyone can't attend those meetings please email me at stewlevy@hotmail.co.uk or stewjolevy@gmail.com

In case your wondering how I know Chris, he and my cousin Kate Ruse http://www.kate-ruse.co.uk/ have been together for over 30 years.
 
When he visited our Yorkshire house for the first time we were standing in the garden admiring the stunning Yorkshire sky and I said to him, 
'how many colours can you see'?
He said 'Oh about 15 at first glance. How about you'?
'Oh', said I, 'about 3, blue, blue and blue'!
That's why he does what he does.






 



Welcome baby Logan

Congratulations Emily and Joe on the birth of your new baby boy 'Logan'. Born on the 7th September at 1.17am, weighing in at 7lb 13oz.

Work in progress

Can you recognise whose work it is? Only a week to go to the Annual Art Club Exhibition. I wonder if any of these will be completed and feature?

A Different Medium

Part finished Painting

Members were in for a treat as well as something completely different this Friday evening, with a demonstration by local artist Bob Morley. His talk entitled “Working with Emulsion Gouache – a different medium” started with a little artistic history about himself and his transition from watercolour to a gouache/watercolour technique. Bob showed numerous works based on this process ranging from early to current paintings.

 For those of us who had previously seen and admired his unusual style, this was a real eye-opener to how Bob goes about this type of painting. His works are based on ordinary (Homebase – jokingly) white emulsion, to which he adds watercolour in varying strengths.
 Starting with a pre-prepared sketch with a little watercolour added, along with a flat plate which had a huge spoonful of thick emulsion in the centre with small amounts of watercolour dabbed from 5ml tubes in a circle around it, Bob showed us first how to mix the two mediums together. It was possible to get quite a large array of tones for each colour using this mixing technique, which could then be applied to the 140lb paper either mixing with wet watercolour on the paper, or going over dry watercolour. This emulsion could be applied in its neat form over a wrong or unwanted existing colour, and then repainted almost straight away!

 For creating beautiful looking trees, Bob first painted the trunk, branches and twigs, followed by paint with a sponge and watercolour, then neat with emulsion – again using the sponge, then again using different shades of colour. He then repainted some of the branches using a rigger. We were then amazed when he applied neat emulsion with a chisel ended brush between the branches in a negative painting way, to leave white or to re-apply the background colour. Bob demonstrated that any mistakes or unwanted parts could be completely blocked out in this fashion, by emulsioning over part of a hedge to add a gate. The build-up of gouache in this way added a textured look to the finished work.

Bob hard at work!

 Using gouache and a strong mix of watercolour like this, Bob said that it was possible to get really dark coloured areas in his work, breaking with convention often by using black. Another way that he would break with convention was to use a rigger with a dark tone in a linear fashion to add lines in various places, especially in horizontal strokes, which he explained added a peaceful feel to the work.

The evening concluded with us all “having a go” to get first-hand experience with this wonderful technique. Finally, we all got to go home with a handy pamphlet compiled by Bob explaining the technique – no expense spared!