New Art Classes for the New Year: Workshop Leader Interview

5th December 2019

What better way to kick-start the New Year than by bringing your visions to fruition with one of our artist-led courses, clubs or classes? Our Life Drawing class returns, along with a new Pet Portraits class, and we are also excited to welcome multi-award winning artist Ben Coode-Adams  who will lead our new Watercolour Painting from the Imagination.

Using the latest insights in spiritual and psychological mindfulness together with his own personal routine of mental and physical preparation for painting, Coode-Adams will teach you how to tap into your inner artist.

Jasmine Crellin, our volunteer blogger, caught up with Ben to find out more:

Watercolour painting often focuses on landscapes and still life. Is that what we can expect from this course?

I will be aiming to give an insight into developing watercolour paintings using imagination. This is not a workshop to help people paint naturalistically.

For me it is important to be in the right frame of mind to paint and I will aim to show attendees how I prepare myself and the theoretical basis of my method.

Sounds exciting. How will we be doing this?

In the first part of the workshop we will discuss the joys of quantum physics and the Many Worlds Theory of Hugh Everett. This will mess with people’s head something proper. To recover we will cleanse and fire up our seven chakras. I know right! Crazy times.

So some quite mind-bending concepts. Will there be any attention paid to the body as well as the brain?

We will prepare our bodies with some gentle and accessible stretches and yoga moves. We need to soften our bodies and perception to undertake a spirit journey entering the realms of the unreal – the lower world. We will develop a question or intention to take with us so we will spend a little time thinking about that before we go through the back of the wardrobe, though the looking-glass or in this case a hole in the floor on our spirit journey. 

Will there also be painting, as well as preparation?

Yes. Cleansed and invigorated, supple and overflowing with imagination we will finally put brush to paper looking for the oblique, tangential and almost seen. We’ll work with lovely colours and shapes and maybe things will work out and all questions will be answered. If nothing else attendees will have a deeper insight into the beautiful paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, be a little more elastic in mind, spirit and body and hey that’s not a bad outcome.

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If top of your New Year’s Resolutions was to take up a hobby and expand your cultural horizons then why not come along? There’s nothing quite like a spiritual, creativity-oriented workshop to set you on a positive plain for the year ahead. So dip into your subconscious, mix up your colours and get ready to create!