As you let go of structures and of definite imagery, you soon realise that you can interpret from your imagination. As you progress with a painting in this way you will notice signals, which lead you to other stages of the painting. Something begins to emerge. Go with it, changing it or redressing it here, using your instinct. You become fluid in the delivery of the painting. With practice, you become aware when you have been successful – you acknowledge that the painting is now finished because the painting will communicate to you. This is very powerful and highly satisfying. Painting in this method promotes the artist to become an individual painter. Once hooked, this avenue of approach is always available to you. The trick is to let go of everything and be willing to immerse yourself into the painting and be open to receiving signals!

Mindfulness involves being with your thoughts as they are, neither grasping at them nor pushing them away. Even better, is if you paint in silence, which is wonderfully empowering, particularly in a small group of people. You will feel refreshed and uplifted with a great sense of achievement. Catch the painting in the moment! Ideally, you should do the whole painting from start to finish in one sitting of one or two hours. The experience and essence are lost if you choose to return to the artwork at another time. Nail it in one go!

Other important principles of painting will also be emphasized including drawing, composition, and tonal values. The workshop will feature demonstrations and individual attention focused on each participant’s unique needs. Impressionist painting remains the most attractive period in the history of modern art and the most appreciated by the public. Series of exhibitions, abundant literature and record sales give evidence of today’s extraordinary resonance of works of the Impressionist painters, of which a number are engraved on our artistic conscience.

At their time, Impressionist works appeared to be so outrageously modern, that it took their contemporaries more than thirty years to finally admit them – if not to like them. However, as the years go by, Impressionism, seems to us nowadays, much more to maintain close links with tradition, and to constitute the aesthetic achievement of an artistic creation related to realistic representation.

This link, long time considered as the most normal thing in the world, to which impressionism had given a new definition based on “impression”, will thereafter lose its compulsory character with the evolution of fine arts in XXth century.The durable success of Impressionism is due to the fact that we are sensitive to its modernity and to its traditionalism.Impressionism cannot be reduced to this unique aspect, it is also a bias to paint cheerful reality, that of leisures and beauty of nature, an endless search for natural light… in a word, a certain art of living which fits in with many aspirations of our society.

 Many streams of influences fed into the growing taste for a more intimate, poetic, and expressive style of landscape art, relying on soft-edged broadly painted tonalities to communicate emotion.

Tonalism is rooted in the French Barbizon movement, which emphasized atmosphere and shadow. The Tonalist style employs a distinctive technique by the use of color’s middle values as opposed to stronger contrast and high chroma. Resulting in a understated and compelling overall effect. The tonalist subject matter is never entirely apparent; there is no effort to communicate a message or narrate a story. Instead of relating a story, each sensitively chosen color, composition, and line is arranged to create an intriguing visual poem.

The interiors of tonalist paintings are generally elegant and sparsely decorated, tonally uniform, simplified and indistinct; the figures are usually presented alone in silent contemplation. Landscapes are typically luscious and luminous with evocative atmospheric effects featuring misty backgrounds illuminated by moonlight. Tonalists painters were drawn to both the natural and spiritual realms. They sought to awaken the viewers consciousness by shrouding the subject in a misty indistinct veil of emotionalism. The palette is minimal, characterized by warm hues of brown, soft greens, gauzy yellows and muted grays. Preferred themes were evocative moonlight nights and poetic, vaporous landscapes. Tonalist painters seemed to favored unconscious states and psychological experiences over reality.

Key terms and phrase associated with the tonalist movement – obscured details, single-figure themes, the natural and spiritual domain, waking, unconscious states, dreams, aura, emotionalism, pictorial space, compositional space, diffused light, incandescent glow, artistic inspiration, illusionistic representation, luminous, transcendentalist, glowing, poetic, evocative.

Many artists struggle in connecting with and transferring vital elements of ourselves such as feeling and emotion which above all leads to expression. This is where the difficulty lies for many of us – how deep can I dive within myself and then be able to transfer or express this thought or feeling into a painting? Without this understanding, it can cause us to have problems in not being able to achieve the measure of satisfaction that we would wish for in the creation of a painting.

The viewer looking at the work sees this also. When we hear someone comment and say that ‘the painting has got soul’ then they are seeing a part of the artist’s makeup and not just a work of art.

Learning to understand and work with our own expression opens up many new avenues and will prove to be both rewarding and ultimately satisfying. Once understood, one then becomes a fully absorbed artist because our everyday life experiences and that of others are constantly being related to and transferred onto a canvas, even if only in thought.

The course will also deal with basic draughtsmanship, layout and composition, understanding landscape and seascape and how the human form can relate to it (balance, use of paint, use of colour, when it is best not to use a brush but to try some other tool for better effect, etc.).

Working and connecting with nature’s elements, such as sea and sky, to open our minds to freedom, expression and beyond, using your imagination. Each artist will be gently guided through this process. The emphasis at this point is to steer away from reality as we see it to reality as we feel it – through painting.