April Freedom in Painting Course in Porthleven , Cornwall

The Life Boat Art Studio - Porthleven

The artists had a fantastic week, (weather included) and this year our exhibition days coincided with the Porthleven Food and Music Festival bringing many more visitors to the town and the studio to view the work. Most of the artists had worked with Ashley before but as always he came up with some new challenges and surprises and the end result was some really exciting work! Porthleven is an extraordinary place with its iconic clock tower, double harbour and beaches and its ever changing light, weather and tides - it never fails to inspire.

Far left -the Lifeboat Art Studio , The Ship Inn, in the foreground 

The artists gathered at the studio Sunday afternoon to set up their space, followed by an introductory talk where Ashley discussed the aims and principles of the course.A perfect opportunity for the group to meet each other before visiting the Ship Inn (which became known as the unofficial office!) for a bite and a pint.

Jane Crane's drawing

The first morning was spent drawing around the harbour from a variety of viewpoints, collecting information and finding inspiration and ideas. After lunch the artists returned to the studio and took part in a series of drawing and colour exercises before Ashley let them loose on their paintings.

Helen  Painting 'Plein Air'

Bruce drawing outside the studio

Day two was structured in a similar way but then the studio became the focus as the artists pushed their paintings further. Ashley was on hand to give individual mentoring and there was lots of opportunities for groups discussions and critiques which the artists found invaluable.Once again everyone enjoyed seeing Ashley develop his own painting, giving an insight into his working process, demonstrating tips and techniques along the way. With the exhibition looming the artists were totally committed, often working into the early evening before retiring to the office for some well earned food, drink and laughter!

Ashley with Mitzi 

Studio Shot

This year the group benefited from an additional half day on Friday morning to finish their paintings and a full day exhibition on the Saturday. Friday afternoon was spent transforming the studio into a gallery in preparation for the Preview on Friday evening and what a transformation! Colour and strong line filed the room, the paintings complimented by the drawings and studies. It looked amazing. Ashley's working painting 'Porthleven 20' was also exhibited but he is still not sure if it has been resolved..., what do you think?

Bruce Campbell's Painting

Helen Herbert's Painting

Ashley Hanson's Painting

John Robson's Painting

Jane Crane's Painting

Mitzi Delnevo's Painting

A BIG thank-you to the Porthleven Food and Music Festival for supporting us and helping to spread the word about the exhibition via the website , Facebook and Twitter and it was great to meet you.

Friday night Preview

Gallery Ready for Opening

Dinner at Amelies

After the Preview we celebrated the week's achievements, together with  the younger Hansons at Amelies Restaurant , thank-you to Paul James (who was one of the performing chef's at the Food Festival) for a lovely dinner.

Before the opening on Saturday, Ashley brought the artists together for a final critique of the work. The exhibition was very well received and the artists enjoyed their many conversations with visitors to the show. 


As well as the increased numbers to the exhibition an added bonus was that all the group got to see and participate in the festival during the weekend.

Well done to everyone, the quality of work produced in just one week was exceptional. From your comments , we are so glad you enjoyed it and hope you are not left too exhausted! As soon as we have the dates in place for next year, we will let you know!

Ashley was interviewed by the Porthleven Food & Drink Festival organisers. Here he  speaks about the Art Exhibition, the artists work made during the week and their commitment to the course and their art practice. 

Our October Porthleven 'Freedom in Painting' course for this year is now fully booked but if you are interested in joining us next year or finding out more about our courses and holidays see www.ashleyhanson.co.uk or would like to join our mailing list email Denise here.

Porthleven Food & Music Festival & Art Exhibition

You can feel the excitement in the air already down in ‪#‎Porthleven‬ as they prepare for the Porthleven Food & Music Festival. We are really looking forward to it - especially with our exhibition coinciding on the same weekend. Hope you can get to both!Come along to the Friday night Preview 5-7.30pm (just before the Hayseed Dixie band are live on stage 7pm ) or the next day, Saturday 10-5pm. Ashley and our experienced artists will be working extremely hard all week - looking forward to showing their work in the exhibition.

The exhibition is in the Lifeboat Art Studio, next to The Ship Inn on Mount Pleasant Road by the harbour.

'City of Glass 30 - (Celestial)' 100x80cms

 


DAY 5

 

The stars went in, an Alizarin glaze on the pink block, a couple of additional lines, tried and discarded, and it was done. This magical moment, when the painting says STOP! is unexplainable, intuitive, based on knowledge only up to a certain point because this is a new thing. Ideas, process, probing, testing, melt into pleasure, the senses.  

 

Familiar themes of the grids of architecture and the street interlocking, a building 'there but not there', now you see it , now you don't.  A rare sky, both inside and outside Grand Central station...fake sky, fake constellations, fact & fiction. The  curve of the sky is the new thing, echoed by curves within the painting. The stalagmite orange line pulsates, the proportion and arrangement of the rectangles feel right, glowing with colour, one with light. A window? I love the strength of the intersection of the long horizontal and vertical,(42nd St & Lexington Ave), almost making a painting within a painting but then not. The eye is led upwards. The familiar figure of Stillman from 'The New York Trilogy' * appeared at one point, two Stillmans, blue left, brown right: there are few traces, edited out, but they forced the issue and moved the painting forwards- this painting is about something else.

 

 

 

 DAY 4



Colour is happening and a more complex space. None of the usual colour horrors bringing it into the daylight. The dominant vertical that emerged - (Lexington Avenue) is on the Golden Section, as is the 'horizon' line. Over 30 years, I can't remember ever using these proportions deliberately/consciously, though I guess they have appeared. Together with the curve of the sky, the painting makes me think of ' The Baptism of Christ' by Piero della Francesca, with the weird hovering bird. Looking at the two paintings, there is also the strange co-incidence of the angled leg of the figure on the right and the diagonal in my painting- spooky, almost a reverse image.

The constellations/letters are going back in tomorrow and refinements adjustments of the verticals and horizontals.

 

 

Early days...the sky will be the deepest blue, letters hidden among the constellations in the vaulted ceiling of Grand Central Station....ghost avenues.....the 'scaffolding' of the streets still raw.. the dual carriageway of Park Avenue pointing to the heavens, also the radio tower atop a half-hidden building...

 * a novel by Paul Auster

'City of Glass 29 - (Babylon)'

'City of Glass 29 - (Babylon)'   100x75cms

TUES   I've had a change of mind-  'Babylon' is the title of the painting.

 

MON    I have been looking for hours at this piece- I think it is resolved. Denise is not sure but Ollie says it's his favourite.

 

Any more additions/complications will detract from the strength of the bricks running through the image of Manhattan.  I've simplified the yellows and Central Park and put in the rivers of New York, adding a curious drawn, linear element to the painting. Now I have, like the novel*, a mix of the ancient and the present day. Manhattan sits, like Babylon, between two rivers, the bricks/canvases and image within reminiscent of the friezes of the Ishtar Gate. The shape of the canvas relates to the ziggurat-shape of the Tower of Babel, which is, of course, made of bricks. The only dilemma is the title: 'Babylon' or 'Tigris and Euphrates'.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The usual horrors when I took it out of the studio into natural light. The yellows are crude and the surface too knobbly and complicated. The bricks/canvases must be more prominent - I'll gouge out the paint in the cracks. Am liking how the Manhattan shape site in the shape of the piece, the pinks are doing something and colours and paint in the Lower East Side. It's not enough- back we go.

 

 

Day 2

I had to go to work today- so just a couple of hours in the studio. Colour is starting to happen and bricks/canvases more prominent. Manhattan image emerging. The larger bricks will be broken down into smaller bricks with the proportions of a New York city block. Manhattan will be covered with a brick pattern instead of blocks- made of bricks like the Tower of Babel. I think the scale is going to be 1 brick = 6 blocks, hence the new title.  The painting takes on the idea of the enormous scale of the new Babel, where every inhabitant of North America will have their own room...... Think again of the words: 1 brick is the size of 6 city blocks... My daughter Faye likes the colours.



Day 1

 

 

* 'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster.

'The Fear & Thrill of the Chase'- Battersea Park Paintings

'In the Park'   165cms x 210cms

Having a look at these early, emotionally charged paintings again recently and seeing how they stand up over time, how strong they are, I feel now is the time to tell their story- especially because of the links/references to the Garden of Eden in my current 'City of Glass' series. Reflection: in each life there are many different lives - back then I was not yet fully formed as an artist or a person but this series - (painted between 1984-88) - gave a few more clues to who I was. There were many influences: the paintings of Edvard Munch, John Fowles's novel, 'The Magus' and music: Joni Mitchell's haunting 'Hejira' ' there is comfort in melancholy, no need to explain.....' and the title, 'The Fear & Thrill of the Chase' from 'Decades', the final track on 'Closer' by Joy Division.

'...here are the young men the weight on their shoulders.....'

I left Canterbury College of Art College in 1983, moving to London and sharing a flat in Battersea, near the park, with a close friend from college. The house next door was derelict and the top floor became my studio. It was Year Zero- time to start again- how much of what you make at college is truly yours? The first paintings- since destroyed- included the power station but it was the park that became the inspiration, providing the setting for the paintings.  The paintings are about an idyll, about friendship and desire, the inarticulate self, communicating emotions through paint.

'In the Park' (above) shows river & lake, a mixture of aerial-view and looking through trees. A group of friends in the top left, and another hidden figure behind the off-white shape that establishes the foreground. It is the same figure- the rear view of a man in an overcoat  - that appeared in my college paintings and re-emerged as 'Stillman' in 'City of Glass'.

'The Lake'    90x72cms

'The Lake', with the fiery willow tree, started off as a picture of a girl, the reddish bush in the background was the back of her head. (She reappears later). I still think this is my best ever depiction of weather and water. In parallel, there was a  painting of the lake that became a figure painting, sadly lost. 

'The Garden of Eden'     175x300cms

On the lake-edge I found a tree where a branch had been removed, leaving behind a perfect heart-shape.  This became the setting for a painting about love, despair, desire and deception.  What I took from 'The Magus' was the idea of the masque and the manipulations of reality and fantasy. Is the girl real or an ideal? - the statue/girl a devise for disguise. The motif of the yellow boat, scratched into the paint and surrounded by text, is taken from 'Melancholy' by Edvard Munch - in some versions it is called 'Jealousy'.......The heart-shape and the snake and the erection were all painted out - too obvious- leaving something raw, starker, bleaker- the message in the painting the enormous, empty space between the two figures.

The building reflected in the water is the pump-house, now a gallery, where we used to go late at night after a few pints. We also used to 'borrow' the boats and row out to the island.

'Southolm St, SW11'   30x20cms

 

The house on Southolm St was surrounded by railways and although the park was a few minutes walk away, I considered the railway-bridge/arch at the end of the street as a gateway, an entrance….. The upside-down arch became a motif, a reflection in the lake.  The figure is probably myself, the house wasn’t pink and there was no tree.



'The Girl'   180x60cms

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bleakness of the ‘Garden of Eden’ was followed by a triptych of near life-size figures, boy on the left, girl, on the right and in the centre an embrace. All that remains is the painting of the girl and the face of the boy-figure, transformed into ‘The Tree’. 

‘The Girl’ was originally called ‘The Awkwardness of Nakedness or The Look That Destroys Men’. Reality and fiction intertwined again, another John Fowles connection, this time a look that Sarah (Meryl Streep) gives to Charles (Jeremy Irons) in the film of ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’.

It is has been cathartic, looking back on these works and my life, as it was, contained within them.

 



'The Island'   60x90cms



'The Tree'    30x20cms

In the studio

Just Released - Our Painting Holidays in Cornwall - 2015

5 Day Painting Holidays in Cornwall

11 - 16 May & 21 - 26 September

We are celebrating our 5th successful year of running our 'Freedom in Painting' holidays in Cornwall this year, and as a way of sharing our celebrations with you, we are offering everyone a £30 discount - if you book by 28th February. So if you've ever thought about coming along - this is definitely the year to do it!

Our holidays are a wonderful opportunity to spend 2 days working in 4 stunning locations on Cornwall's north and south coast followed by 2 full days developing the paintings and ideas in our village studio, high on Bodmin Moor.

Prices from £420 include:

• 5 nights accommodation
• 4 full days tuition
• 1 to 1 tuition
• Group critiques
• All lunches
• Ferry trip to Polruan (Sep Hol)
• Celebratory last night evening meal 

There are lots of accommodation options available depending on your budget and requirements -  you can hire a cottage on your own, share a cottage with friends or make new friends sharing a cottage. You can even book the holiday as a course only for £360 or come along as a non-participant at a special rate.

In collaboration with Great Art and Discover Art magazine, we offered a free place on our September holiday  in a competition last year and the winner Nicola McLean was asked by Discover Art magazine to write about her experiences with us. You can read Nicola's write up here.

You can be assured of the highest level of teaching throughout the course. Ashley has a wealth of experience both as an artist and tutor. He has been a Visiting Lecturer at Canterbury Christchurch University and the National Academy of Art, Bergen, Norway and has shown at many galleries nationally and internationally including selection for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the National Open art Competition and the Discerning Eye. Ashley has recently been elected a member of the Newlyn Arts Society.

We feel very privileged to have made so many great friends on our holidays along the way, with many of them returning year after year. We often here how Ashley's tutoring continues to inspire and benefit artists long after the course.

I had some really good feedback from the new work I produced after my course last year - have really tried to introduce Ashley's brighter colour palette to my paintings.
Debbie Zoutewelle 2014

My course with Ashley has moved my art work in a different direction. I have happy memories of my Cornwall week.
Fiona Robertson 2014

I'm impatient to have time to explore working now loosely on landscapes - Ashley's workshop has potentially set me on a new road artistically.
Nicola McLean 2014

I always love to see how your work is shaping, and the pics from each course you run. When I can , I'd love to come back again, as your ways are so inspiring and I can see how they are there in my work now, methodology and language.
Phil Longhurst 2014

Penzance 4 - Ashley Hanson

To Book

To find out more about this year's holidays and prices see here or email denise@ashleyhanson.co.uk

Remember - don't leave it too late! Book before 28th February and get a £30 discount.

You can find lots more information about Ashley's art practice at www.ashleyhanson.co.uk
For write ups on previous holidays, courses, art and exhibitions see also http://ashleyhansonart.blogspot.co.uk.

Thanks to artist Heather Rachel Johnston for the use of selective photos.

Canterbury Workshop - 'The Space Between'

Katrina Dallamore's painting

Ashley's  much anticipated 'Freedom in Painting' workshop at Canterbury Christchurch University was yet again another full house. This time the theme was 'The Space Between' and in advance of the course the artists were encouraged to look at two paintings by Matisse, 'Open Window, Collioure' (1905) and 'Window at Collioure (1914)

Ashley with the groups drawings

Bridget Thompson & David Carnegie's paintings

The workshop started with a simple still life and the group were asked to do 10 - 12 drawings of different arrangements and view points of the 2 objects, concentrating on the space between them. These studies became the basis of the first painting.

Laurie Porter's Painting

Everyone brought along a second canvas and with this painting, the artists had the option to switch to a view through an open window, concentrating on the idea of the space between.

On the morning of the second day Ashley demonstrated the idea of 'freedom' and exploration of the subject, which the group seemed to enjoy and gave them something to think about.

Kate Sexton's painting

A lot of ground was covered but the artists all rose to the challenge and as always, some very exciting, highly individualistic work was produced - some figurative, some abstract, some in the space between.....

The workshop had strong links with his own work. Ashley has been exploring this theme himself in his recent paintings see recent Blog post & November post

Kat Wiles painting

Most of the group had 2 paintings to discuss and so the group critique took a bit longer than anticipated. Ashley would like to apologies for over running - given the chance Ashley would talk all day about the paintings, but he has promised to improve his time keeping for the next workshop! He really enjoyed working with you all and came back exhausted and exhilarated! 

Sarah Stokes painting

Thank-you to everyone who attended and for all your very useful feed back. Special thanks to Antonia and Sarah for allowing me to use their photographs. We haven't been able to include everyone's paintings in this blog post - and they were all so good it was impossible to choose, so there are lots more on this link to facebook. 

Antonia Glynne Jones painting

Teddy Kempster's painting

Ashley went on the next day to give a talk and demonstration at the Weald of Kent Art Group. Thank-you to John and the rest of the group for your wonderful hospitality.

We do hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and a successful, creative New Year and hope to see you again next year!

Best wishes

Denise & Ashley




Some comments from the workshop:

Very supportive approach and good teaching style. Feel more confident
Katrina Dallamore

Ashley's very approachable, gentle and sensitive while being a clear dynamic tutor and workshop leader. Big thank-you, thoroughly enjoyed my journey!
Selina Firth

As always, stimulating, challenging, exhausting! I look forward to more.
Teddy Kempster



Useful drawing, fantastic subject, title/brief and great enthusiasm.
Antonia Glynne Jones