In a major new initiative we have set up an exciting ‘virtual’ online painting week at the Watermill. Every day of the week, for a couple of hours, you will be able to paint along with inspiring tutor Mike Willdridge, capturing with your brush beautiful scenes at the Watermill and nearby. As well as painting in and around the Watermill, you will ‘visit’ an imposing castle, market day in a walled mediaeval town, a nearby fishing village, the cloisters of a quiet convent and a hilltop village with imposing mountains in the background. And the location above.
You’ll enjoy daily interactive sessions on Zoom. Full of fun, it’s just like an international painting club where you can enjoy the convivial company of like-minded people. You will paint along with Mike every day from Saturday 28 November to Friday 4 December 2020 inclusive. Each session will last a couple of hours or so. It’s the next best thing to being here and it will bring Italian sunshine and memories of la Bella Vita to brighten your days. And don’t be daunted, as well as being fun, Mike’s virtual week is very much a ‘mini course in watercolour painting. He says: “I have laid out to assist the beginner: we start easy and progress through the week and each day is related to the others, so it will benefit both the beginner and those with more experience.”
To help give you the real flavour of a Watermill painting week, as well as those live daily paint-along sessions, you will also receive mouth-watering Watermill recipes, for you to try out at home. After each painting session there will be an exclusive video of Mike’s demonstration to refresh your memory.
There will also be a daily gallery where you can post your paintings and admire the efforts of your fellow participants paintings. and you’ll even have a chance to win one of Mike’s outstanding paintings.
*Because of all the work involved, we are going to have to make a small charge for this course, but we think it’s very reasonable: just £70 (GB pounds) for all seven sessions. (This is a block booking, but if you can’t make one of the sessions, you will still be able to catch up with access to the video, and still be able to see the Gallery and have a chance to win one of Mike’s paintings.) Please register using the watermill contact form, selecting ‘Week’s online courses, Mike Willdridge, Nov 28-Dec 4’. We would love you to sign up and join us.
On the first Saturday you will sketch the Statue of the Cherubs in Pisa. That’s a photograph of the statue by Alfonso Romero at the top of this article. You may recognise the building in the background!) Don’t worry: on your virtual session in Pisa you will be expected to draw that statue above in any great detail. Mike says: “I’m including this statue in my view of Pisa, but only briefly drawing it – nothing too detailed or challenging.” Mike’s view looks more like this:
Pisa is the city where most of our guests on a Watermill painting course arrive for their week , so we thought it would be instructive to tell you a little something about the place.
As the guidebook Lonely Planet has it, Pisa “is best known for an architectural project gone terribly wrong.”
But there is much more to the city than the Leaning Tower and the Piazza dei Miracoli, in which the tower, the cathedral and the baptistery are located. Nonetheless, it is not to be missed. Visits to the tower are well organised and controlled and it is a ‘must do’ to climb to the top, so you can suffer from both seasickness (the lean affects your sense of balance as you spiral slowly up the staircase) and vertigo as you totter towards the balustrade at the summit.
In our opinion, the most glorious building in the complex is the baptistry. Started in 1152 and completed in 1363 (you can’t hurry these things), it shows the transition from the Romanesque style, with rounded arches in the lower section, to the Gothic above with pointed arches.
You can see these styles in the city, too, with Romanesque palazzi and Gothic churches, as well as elegant neo-Classical squares. Pisa was once a powerful maritime city-state, but silt and the Genovese eventually put paid to that, the silt clogging up the harbour and the Genovese defeating the Pisans in a decisive naval battle. Later, the Florentine’s took over.
The city has also been long famous for its university: Galileo Galilei was the teacher here and today it is one of the best in Italy. This makes a great contribution to an exuberant city life away from the tourist melee, with busy restaurants, cafés and bars. Many of our guests spend a day in Pisa before or after coming to us and we can give you their recommendations for hotels, boarding houses and places to eat, on request.
I have made one of those 30-second Facebook slideshows showing all our stunning locations for the virtual week, which you can see by clicking here.
Please register using the watermill contact form, selecting ‘Week’s online courses, Mike Willdridge, Nov 28-Dec 4’. We would love you to sign up and join us.
