Presenting Catherine Beale
- 18 - 25 September 2027
Capturing Light
“Capturing light” is Catherine’s forte and she will be teaching this with “real watercolours”, ranging from thick tubed paint, via gossamer veils of colour to dry white paper. She believes in gaining inspiration first-hand from our immediate environment and so will be painting subjects around and about the mill, often returning to the studio to develop them further. She will be helping you to explore skills such as:
– developing a light source
– handling water subjects
– introducing ink line illustration
– decoding manmade/built environment
– extending towards semi-abstraction.
Handouts, selective demos, one-to-one discussion, emergency source photos and a love of watercolours are all included!
About Catherine and her teaching philosophy
Catherine is an enthusiastic watercolour specialist and former oil painter. Her artistic practice began three decades ago in Singapore where the British High Commission hosted her first solo exhibition and she received commissions from the US Embassy, Clubs and corporations. She now paints from her hillside studio in Bath (UK) at the foot of the Cotswolds, is an elected member of the Society of Women Artists and received national and regional awards for her portraits and landscapes.
Catherine encourages painters to relinquish control, dropping and stroking paint on lightly and allowing watercolours to come ‘alive’ using the full beauty of natural watermarks. Her greatest joy is the delight on painters’ faces when surprised by their own fantastic results!
Catherine has distilled watercolour techniques into a series of steps she calls ‘gravity painting’. She encourages experimental mixing ‘alla prima’ directly on the surface ensuring radiant colour and loose mark making – scary but so fulfilling (and exciting!). After the juicy, flowing and dripping paint has dried, ‘glow’ is added through ‘lifting off’ and crisp paint/ink line brings compositions together. All suggestions have been tested while writing her art book ‘Capturing Light’ (Search Press Ltd 2023) and she is used to explaining these steps in her workshops, newsletters and in monthly articles for The Leisure Painter and The Artist Magazine/Painters-online (Warners Group Publications plc) as well as teaching at centres of excellence like the Royal West of England Academy Drawing School and Cornwall School of Art. All the while she extends her own skills in painting to commission and exhibition, and testing new surfaces, paint colours and brushes. This year she has been selected to exhibit with the International Watercolour Masters (UK).
