Adult Courses

Expand your thinking outside the usual 'landscape-shaped' box. Learn to draw and paint in a panoramic format using extensive vistas both near and far, either as your subject matter or simply as a means to create an extended visual journal. You will learn how to make your own portable concertina sketchbooks and expand your repertoire of mark making as the tutor helps you to experiment with materials and investigate different ways of seeing the same subject. Perhaps you will even find a new focus for your art practice. This course includes an outing to the White Horse at Uffington, high on the escarpment of the Berkshire Downs, with far reaching views across the Vale of White Horse and beyond. Please see course notes for items to bring.

Working in a Panoramic format

Using the extensive College grounds to begin with, you will practice drawing subjects, either from close up, intimate compositions of everyday objects, to long distance, rural views. All in a panoramic format. This might also include a bit of art journalling practice where you can record ideas or moments in your day in a continuous, visual thread.

Making drawings and notes in the landscape

Working outside in the elements, such as wind and rain, doesn't always allow us the luxury of time for a more considered approach. This course is designed to promote spontaneity, working rapidly and intuitively in front of the subject, creating a fertile ground for happy accidents. It is not about making perfect drawings but more to do with recording fleeting ideas and gathering information in the form of your own visual shorthand.

If you are working outside and the weather is clement, to develop drawings a little further, perhaps using a variety of dry colour mediums such as pens and pastels, or water-based painting mediums, like watercolour, gouache or acrylic paints.

The outings will involve some walking, interspersed with stops for making time-limited studies. These exercises will include a variety of different methods and techniques designed to test your responses to place, space and composition, form, colour, light and perspectives.

In the studio

From these humble beginnings, back in the studio you will learn to analyse your sketches and look at ways to carry the process forward.

In a series of exercises to help in that process, you will explore the dual aspects of 'art-making' and how far on either side of the scale you wish to take your artwork. For example, some of the questions you might be asked to consider:

• Colour choices: hue and shade: primaries, secondaries and tertiary colours; making complimentary earth colours etc
• Overall colour temperature: hot of cool?
• Abstracted or figurative: photographic realism or unrecognisable? How far to take it?
• Line and mark-making: hard or soft / broad or fine / straight or curved / hatched or pointed etc.
• Tonal quality: black and white / between light and dark / intense or subdued?
• Density: between transparent and opaque / radiant or matt?
• Emotional scale: high intensity colours or mono-tonal / lyrical or 'academic', etc.
• Physical scale: monumental proportions or diminutive PC format, for example
• Structure and composition: parred back and whimsical or hard-edged and solid?
• Surface texture: smooth or impasto / mixed media collage, etc
• Responding to sensory stimuli: sights and sounds of nature, such as bird song, wind through trees, etc
• Shape and form: defined or suggested?
• Distance: close-up, far away, or middle distance? etc.

Outing to Uffington

In the middle of the course, we will spend a day away from the studio and the College grounds and venture across the border into Oxfordshire, to sketch the extensive views from the location of the iconic white 'dragon' horse at Uffington. The whole area surrounding Whitehorse Hill is stuffed with ancient sites of interest and if time and weather permits, you can either explore the Neolithic long barrow and chamber tomb at Wayland's Smithy, or the Uffington Hill Fort, both within walking distance, nearby. Uffington 'Castle', which occupies the summit of Whitehorse Hill, is a rare and outstanding example of a large Iron Age hill fort. Even the views along the ancient Ridgeway track are worthy of note.

The course will culminate in a (voluntary) public group show and final critique.

All levels of ability welcome

This course is suitable for all levels of ability and, in particular, ideally suited for participants who want to move their practice forward. Please also note, there is some walking involved which might not always be on level ground.

Materials and clothing

Each participant will be given a concertina sketchbook and basic drawing materials and inks to get started, including a small set of acrylic paints and brushes. You will also be shown how to make your own portable concertina sketch books.

Although you will have all the materials you need to get going, students are also encouraged to bring along any other medium that they particularly like working with or would like to experiment with.

Please be prepared to wear suitable clothing and footwear for studio work, as well as outdoor 'adventuring' in all weather conditions and different surface terrain.

The Art of Pilgrimage

The tutor, artist Caro Woods' own work revolves around the practice and process of pilgrimage. In 2015, she made a solo equine pilgrimage from Lindisfarne in Northumberland to St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall and in 2017, she rode her 'white' Connemara Pony to all the visible 9 White Horse Hill figures in Wiltshire and Uffington, this time with 3 friends and collaborators.

This practical Summer School art course will include an introduction and tutor talk based on Caro's own experience and asks the question: How might we express our inner journeys whilst undertaking the challenges of the outer, physical journeys?

Your tutor is also in the habit of working alongside participants so that she experiences the same challenges that her students face and therefore more able to tackle any issues that might arise. www.carowoods.com

Contact

If you have any queries regarding materials or clothing requirements, please don't hesitate to contact the tutor. caro@carowoods.co.uk

Caro Woods

MA Falmouth 2003

About Caro

Caro Woods MA, (born 1954). Aged 18, Caro studied at the Sir John Cass School of Art, London, before gaining her MA in 'Contemporary Visual Practice' at Falmouth School of Art, in 2003.

Widowed shortly after her first marriage at the age of 24, a move to the Channel Islands in 1989, re-marriage and the birth of her two children, Caro started to tramp the cliff paths of Jersey, recording the landscape in pocket-sized sketch books. This obsession with walking in the landscape in search of the perfect light or the perfect composition, resulted in a practice that was as much about walking in nature as it was about painting, becoming increasingly fascinated by the land as a multifaceted mass of geology, archaeology, energetic forces, pathways and tangible ley lines that echo down through the ages. "In fact, everything that has been imprinted onto our landscape, including mythological archetypes and folklore, as well as pagan rituals that embrace the rhythmic cycles of life and death in nature. I felt a natural gravitation towards the places that still showed traces of where our ancestors would have lived, worked, walked their paths and practiced their rituals at stone circles, menhirs andancient burial mounds. And by 'tuning in' to my surroundings, it also seems a natural progression for me to use my understanding of the healing power of nature and the environment to work with the energetic points, ley lines and chakras of the earth's body, applied via vibrations of my own internal chakras, footsteps and reflective thoughts.”

Caro now lives on the edge of Dartmoor National Park. Recognising the paths we follow are loaded with metaphors for life and pursuing her deep interest in spirituality, Caro's practice has evolved into a search for an aesthetic that mirrors her own spiritual journey and she began to see herself as an Artist as Pilgrim and her work increasingly concerned with concepts surrounding the ideas and practice of pilgrimage.

www.carowoods.com/recent-projects/

www.whitehorsesride.wordpress.com

caro@carowoods.co.uk