Bottling Your Painting Holiday - Part 1

When I began teaching on painting holidays, my preoccupation, quite naturally was with the imparting of technique. I took it as a given that our novel surroundings would be uppermost on students' minds and that the main object of a week abroad would be how to depict the trees, the mountains, the rooftops, the locals; you name it, to a foreigner, even a doorknob can look fascinating.


Painting holiday students are acquisitive creatures, as devoted to the idea of making everything subject to their paintbrush as the most avid Japanese tourist with a camera.

At Chateau L'Age Baston, even before they've unpacked their suitcases, students' eyes are alighting on the geraniums in pots by the Guardian House, the well in the courtyard, the pigeonierre with its pagoda roof, the ivy around the pantry door, the big gates to the walnut orchard and Napoleon and Picasso, the baudet donkeys. But while a serious study of any of these subjects is valuable, not a single one of them makes a picture.

The strangeness of our surroundings can put our acquisitiveness into over-drive. Everything that flits into view must be netted, put in a jam jar and logged. It's what our sketchbooks are for, after all. But I've acquired the pigeonierre ten times over and the geraniums and the well. My I-Spy collection of L'Age Baston artefacts may be complete but I'm not necessarily any nearer to creating a single work of art.

Something else happens on a painting holiday. Amateur artists who only snatch a couple of hours a week to paint (if they're lucky) find themselves with time on their hands. They sit in the garden under the walnut trees, with the morning sun upon their faces and all the ideas they thought they had evaporate like yesterday's dreams. The little sable brush they couldn't wait to pick up begins to feel as unwieldy as a tree trunk and the lunch bell dangles mutely outside the kitchen door. Time to ourselves, you see, also means time with ourselves. There are no distractions now. For the first time in years, perhaps, we are alone with our wishes, but what exactly are they? The colours glow brightly and the paper is waiting.

So these days, I place more emphasis on what motivates us and the sleight of hand, or trick of the mind, that turns a picture into a work of art.

There is, as far as I know, only one way to jump out of an aeroplane. It cannot be done by degrees. You are either trembling on the threshold, with several cubic tonnes of air rushing by you and the ground, a hazy notion at your feet or you are falling - or is it flying? And so, the artist must take a leap too. The white paper is a void as big as the sky. Choose the brightest, boldest colour in your paintbox. And just as the skydiver has no choice but to let the air carry him or her where it will, so you let the colour lead you across the paper. It may not be the shape that is in front of you, but it will be your shape. Do not be too ambitious. No need for somersaults. It's enough that you have at last, jumped.

These are examples of Day One exercises at L'Age Baston. Students were asked to choose no more than three colours and to put paint directly onto the paper without any preliminary drawing. The only other rules were 1) to ensure every colour shape related to the one next to it as well as to the boundaries of the picture itself and 2) to leave a narrow gap between different colours. This would ensure that our pictures would be as bright as possible. Unnatural and inaccurate, they may be, but we had all stopped collecting things and instead of bottling the world, we had begun to add to it.

Isn't that what being creative is all about?