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Archives for November 2018

Living legends, the Forbidden City, a gossipy village, photo competition winners: all this and more in this month’s newsletter

30 Nov By

The Watermill at Posara for painting, creative writing, knitting, and Italian language holidays/vacations/workshops, Tuscany, Italy.The Watermill December 2018 newsletter is just out and you can see it by clicking here.  As well as the latest availability for all our creative courses, there are stories on:

  • The Living Legends who will run a Watermill Scriptwriting course
  • The winners of the Watermill Photographic Competition
  • Peonies and the Forbidden City
  • Our neighbourhood from another point of view
  • Mike Willdridge is well on the road to abstraction
  • A gossipy village by Varvara Neiman
  • A knitting week ‘out of time’
  • Why ‘grace notes’ are important in Italian
The Watermill at Posara for painting, creative writing, knitting, and Italian language holidays/vacations/workshops, Tuscany, Italy.

Val Joplin’s winning picture in the Watermill Photographic Competition

And don’t forget that there is less than a month left to take advantage of our enticing Early Bird offer: we will give you £GBP 75 off any of our 2019 creative courses if you book before 31 December 2018. We’d love to welcome you here, but in the meantime happy reading…

Painting by Varvara Neiman, a tutor at The Watermill at Posara painting holidays/vacations, Tuscany, Italy.

A gossipy village, by Watermill painting tutor Varvara Neiman

 

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Mike is well on the way to abstraction

29 Nov By

Painting by Mike Willdridge, a tutor at The Watermill at Posara painting holidays/vacations, Tuscany, Italy.Our friend and enthusiastic Watermill painting tutor Mike Willdridge is well on the way to completing his self-imposed task of producing 100 paintings in 100 days. He’s in his late 60s now: that’s painting number 68 above.

Mike says: “For a long time I’ve enjoyed looking at abstract art and wanted to move in that direction myself, but I found it difficult to leave my representational style. Now that I have given up most of my teaching (except at the Watermill!), I’ve found a renewed energy towards abstraction.”

Of the picture above, he says: “It could be my many years of representational painting that keeps telling me to see something from the real world in these paintings. However, as part of my journey towards abstraction, I’m trying to banish these thoughts as I paint and just respond to the ‘colour’, ‘drama’, ‘light’ etc. That’s part of the reason why I’m just titling these paintings by their numbers.”

Mike’s artistic road has been an exciting one and we’ve been looking at his wonderful pictures on his Facebook page (Mike Willdridge), on Instagram (@mikewilldridge) and on his website (www.mikewilldridge-artist.com). We liked some of his pictures so much that we have bought four of them. Here’s one of those: Picture No. 5.

You can see our four ‘Road to Abstraction’ pictures if you join us for one of our creative courses next year. And if you come in early June, you will be able to meet the artist himself.

You don’t have to go ab