Our inspiring 2022 painting tutors
Here is the complete list of our painting tutors for 2022. You can find out more about each of them by clicking on their Profile page link in their entries below.
Keiko Tanabe - one or two places left
21 – 28 May 2022
Watercolours
To learn more about Keiko and her course at the mill, please visit her 2022 Profile Page.
Maggie Renner Hellman - two or three places left
28 May - 4 June 2022
Courageous Color Workshop’ Your choice: oils, acrylics, pastels and/or watercolour travel sketches
To learn more about Maggie and her course at the mill, please visit her 2022 Profile Page.
Ruth Korch - fully booked, waiting list open
4 - 11 June 2022
Art journaling
To learn more about Ruth and her course at the mill, please visit her 2022 Profile Page.
Randy Hale - two or three places left
11 - 18 June 2022
Watercolours
To learn more about Randy and his course at the mill, please visit his 2022 Profile Page.
Vicki Norman - fully booked, waiting list open
2 - 9 July 2022
Oils and watercolours (and other mediums)
To learn more about Vicki and her course at the mill, please visit her 2022 Profile Page.
Pamme Turner - two or three places left
9 - 16 July 2022
Watercolour and gouache en plein air
To learn more about Pamme and her course at the mill, please visit her 2022 Profile Page.
Carl March -
two or three places left
16 - 23 July 2022
Drawing and watercolour en plein air
To learn more about Carl and his course at the mill, please visit his 2022 Profile Page.
Paul Talbot-Greaves - three or four places left
20 - 27 August 2022
Watercolours (and acrylics)
To learn more about Paul and his course at the mill, please visit his 2022 Profile Page.
Rebecca de Mendonça - three or four places left
27 August - 3 September 2022
Pastels
To learn more about Rebecca and her course at the mill, please visit her 2022 Profile Page.
Mike Willdridge - fully booked, waiting list open
3 - 10 September 2022
Watercolours and drawing (also gouache and acrylics, with a special emphasis on drawing on location.)
To learn more about Mike and his course at the mill, please visit his 2022 Profile Page.
Varvara Neiman - still plenty of places
10 - 17 September 2022
Water-based oils, acrylics and watercolours
To learn more about Varvara and her course at the mill, please visit her 2022 Profile Page.
Milind Mulick - fully booked, waiting list open
17 - 24 September 2022
‘Colourful watercolours’
To learn more about Milind and his course at the mill, please visit his 2022 Profile Page.
Cynthia Armstrong - one or two places left
24 September - 1 October 2022
Watercolours and gouache
To learn more about Cynthia and her course at the mill, please visit her 2022 Profile Page.
Tim Wilmot - two or three places left
1 - 8 October 2022
Watercolours
To learn more about Tim and his course at the mill, please visit his 2022 Profile Page.
Grahame Booth - fully booked, waiting list open
8 - 15 October 2022
Watercolours
To learn more about Grahame and his course at the mill, please visit his 2022 Profile Page.
Featured painting tutor of the month (1): Carl March
We love this watercolour, which our tutor Carl March recently published on Facebook. It’s a wonderful compilation of colours and shapes and a composition which really draws you into the picture. Carl calls this page from his sketchbook ‘Winter Heath,’
Like most artists, Carl uses his sketchbook constantly, and if you join us on his inspiring painting course at the Watermill this summer, he will encourage you to do the same in the glorious countryside surrounding the mill.
We have 11 people already booked into this course, but we have room for one or two more painters (and their non-painting partners if they would like to join them). And don’t forget you will be Cool and Green: all our bedrooms and public rooms, including the studio, are air-conditioned, powered by our hidden array of photovoltaic cells which make us self-sufficient in electricity.
Bring your sketchbook!
All the fun of the fair: another couple of scintillating pages from Carl’s sketchbook
Carl March -
two or three places left
16 - 23 July 2022
Drawing and watercolour en plein air
To learn more about Carl and his course at the mill, please visit his 2022 Profile Page.
Featured painting tutor of the month (2): Paul Talbot-Greaves
We always say you will be Cool and Green at the Watermill, referring to our efforts to be as environmentally friendly as we possibly can, not least with our cooling air conditioning in every room, powered by our hidden array of photovoltaic cells, which makes us self-sufficient in electricity
But there’s a lot of other green around the Watermill, in this glorious area of rural Tuscany: trees, grasses, our famous bamboo and a myriad of other greenery. And, let’s face it, it’s not always that easy to capture it with your brush. Well, who better to teach you to paint green (or rather, greens) that Watermill tutor Paul Talbot-Greaves, who will be with us again this summer?
The picture above is from Paul’s online tutorial 'Painting Greens in Watercolour', (https://www.talbot-greaves.com/online-tutorials) while on the left is his watercolour of the road from Posara to the nearby walled mediaeval town of Fivizzano. Green, but scintillating.
We still have a few places left on Paul’s watercolour course (dates and the link below), so why not join him at the Watermill and be doubly green?
Paul Talbot-Greaves - three or four places left
20 - 27 August 2022
Watercolours (and acrylics)
To learn more about Paul and his course at the mill, please visit his 2022 Profile Page.
Medical inspiration for Helen’s amazing knitting creations
We aways admire the skill and dexterity of our knitting week guests as they work on the projects devised for them by our tutors. And do you know they often knit away without looking! Not only that, they have amazing mathematical skills, able easily to make complicated calculations and to understand complex patterns.
But we were particularly impressed by one of the guests on our first knitting week this year, Helen Connington, from the city of Hull in the north-east of England, whose career a Nurse Practitioner has bought a fresh and fascinating dimension to her the knitted creations.
Above right you can see what we call Helen’s ‘X-ray pullover,’ an evocation in wool of what lies beneath the skin of wearer, ribs, body parts and all. And above left an ‘ECG’ pattern, designed and knitted by Helen. If you look carefully, you can see a blip in the heart rhythm, caused by the love of the wearer’s life passing by.
Still time to grab a place on a Watermill knitting holiday
We call them knitting and la Bella Vita Italiana and our knitting holidays are the perfect relaxing combination of knitting every day with like-minded people, enjoying the unspoiled atmosphere and beautiful scenery of rural Tuscany, together with inspiring teaching, warm hospitality and delicious food and wine. There are excursions to an imposing castle, to market day in a walled mediaeval town, to the quintessential Italian city of Lucca or to the seaside delights of the Cinque Terre. And of course, knitting, knitting and knitting in the sunshine or in the dappled shade.
We are on our second knitting holiday of the season, with Louisa Harding, but we still have a place left on Debbie Abrahams’ week, if you’d like to make a last-minute booking. Details and a link below.
Debbie Abrahams has been designing and teaching handknitted textiles for more than 20 years and is a specialist in the field of colour work and beading.
Throughout her entire career she has worked alongside renowned handknit company Rowan Yarns, both as a Designer and a Design Consultant for the brand. She has tutored workshops across the UK, Europe and the USA.
Debbie is best known for her Mystery Blanket and Cushion Clubs which have been become a global success with more than 1,000 knitters from all over the world signed up to her annual projects. "Blanket squares are the perfect vehicle for my designing, giving me the freedom to explore colour, texture and embellishment within a set number of stitches and rows for each block – it’s just pure adventure!"
On her 2022 Watermill course you will be working with Debbie on a specially designed project, incorporating several different knitting techniques, including colourwork, knitting with beads and textured stitches.
Debbie Abrahams - one place left
14 - 21 May 2022
Knitting and La Bella Vita
To learn more about Debbie and her course at the mill, please visit our 2022 Profile Page.
Don't forget your partner!
And don’t forget that your friend or partner doesn’t need to participate in the creative course, whether it’s painting, language or writing.
We offer them a range of Alternative activities for partners on all our 2022 courses, as well as a generous £GBP 250 discount if they share a room with you.
Jo Parfitt is bursting with pride
Jo’s son Joshua and his first book
There is a lovely story in Jo Parfitt’s Monthly Inspirer newsletter about three generations of writers in her family. We will let her tell the story in her own words :
“My father would have been so proud.
“Joshua, our 29-year-old, has just published his first book and at the end of April he came to visit us in the UK from his home in Spain to launch it into the world. My father gave up his day job as a senior lecturer in Maths and Computing, to be a full-time writer at the age of 55. He went on to write 31 books. I knew I wanted to be a writer at the age of 15 and, at 24, my first book, French Tarts, was published by Octopus. I have now written 32 books.” And now, as the first in a third generation of writers, Joshua has written Back to the Slate Mines: Reviving the Collyweston Slate Industry.
"It was published by us at Summertime Publishing with funding from a local building company. Josh spent seven years of his childhood growing up in Collyweston, a Northamptonshire village famed for its ancient slate mines and and iconic roofworks."
Josh, his brother, Sam and their friends used to play in the disused slate mines that lay across a cornfield from our house. Climate change and the lack of freezing winters meant the industry had had to die out. But now, thanks to hard work and university research, Collyweston slate is mined once more. The new slate adorns Bodley’s Court, Cambridge, which won the 2020 Roof of the Year in the Heritage Roofing category.
"So, yes, Collyweston slate is a big deal and yes, Josh writing the book is a big deal too. We were living in the Netherlands at the time of the commission and so Josh went to live with his grandparents while he researched. He spent time on rooftops, interviewing slaters, went down mineshafts and visited everyone and everywhere he could that would increase his knowledge. Not only would Grandpa be proud as punch (he died before the book was published) of his grandson, but my brother, Josh’s uncle, Patrick Gosling, took most of the photographs too. This really was a family affair.”
Jo will be with us again this June for another of her famous Write your life stories courses. We are currently fully booked, but as we always say, there may well be cancellations, so if you would like to come and learn the secrets of writing your memoirs, please let us know via the Watermill Contact Form by clicking here.
Our 2022 Creative Writing course
Jo Parfitt - fully booked, waiting list open
18 – 25 June 2022
Write your life stories
To learn more about Jo and her course at the mill, please visit her 2022 Profile Page.
Time to get rid of your cianfrusaglie
Picture: The Local, Italy
Here’s a lovely Italian word, courtesy of The Local, the online English-language newspaper: cianfrusaglie. It is pronounced chan-froo-ZA-yleh and if it clutters up your mouth and trips up your tongue, that’s the way it should be, says the newspaper, because cianfrusaglie means “knickknacks, odds and ends, bric-a-brac, clutter: valueless junk, essentially, clutter.”
So, if your house is piena di cianfrusaglie, full of clutter, now is the time to start le pulizie di primavera¸spring cleaning. When you’ve finished, why not treat yourself to a week at the Watermill, to learn more intriguing words and more about the delightful Italian language?
Convivial conversation and no clutter in the Watermill walled garden
Join us to soak up Italian and enjoy la bella vita iItaliana on our unique Italian Language course, which is running again this autumn, from Saturday 15 October to Saturday 22 October 2022.
This really is a ‘course with a difference’. Not only are there formal lessons on the vine verandah (some 20 hours in the week), but you also make trips and excursions to savour the natural beauty of Lunigiana, the area around the mill, to explore its history and culture, to sample its traditional foods – and above all, to meet the people, speak Italian, and practise what you’ve learned.
The Watermill has teamed up again with Italian language tutor Giulia Balestri, to produce a week in which you can learn Italian in the most natural and enjoyable way. Your immersion into the language and culture of real Italians will also be individually customised, to suit your curiosity and your interests, helping you to treasure everything you learn and make it a seamless part of who you are.
This exciting language course is suitable for all levels of ability, because of the special approach inspired by Professor Bertrand Schwartz of Paris University, who overturned the concept of teaching to adults, with a method that not only develops theoretical knowledge, but practical know-how as well. The aim is to enhance the personal qualities of each student, tailoring the teaching to their needs and ambitions, establishing active and confident relationships, where the student is the true protagonist in the course.
Learning Italian
under the dappled shade of the vine verandah
One previous course participant said: “A super language week: well organised, giving us a taste of the ‘real Italy.’ Despite the disparity in ability our tutor managed to help all of us towards a better understanding and production of the Italian language. The lessons were fun, interactive and helped me enormously.”
Another added: “I can honestly say it was the nicest week I have had for a long time.”
We have 10 people already booked into this relaxing and inspiring week, two of whom are nonparticipating partner, so we have room for three or four more ‘language-learners’ – and their partners, too, if they would like to join them.
Our 2022 Italian Language course
Giulia Balestri - still three or four places
15 - 22 October 2022
Learning Italian with the Italians
To learn more about Giulia and her
2022 course at the mill, please click here.
Everything's included in your watermill painting holiday, creative writing holiday, knitting week or Italian Language course
Don’t forget that everything is included in the cost of a painting holiday, writing, knitting, or language holiday: tuition, accommodation (including all linen and towels), pre-dinner aperitifs, all meals and local transportation (including transfers to Pisa airport; an excursion by train to visit the ancient walled city of Lucca or the stunning seaside villages of the Cinque Terre).
All you have to do is to get to Pisa airport and we do the rest.
Whether you're travelling alone or with a partner you can be sure of a warm welcome, and that you'll be well looked after. We have built our reputation on the comfort of the mill and the care we provide.
We very much look forward to welcoming you to the mill and, for those of you who have already tasted the many delights at The Watermill at Posara, we look forward to welcoming you back.
With very best wishes a tutti
Lois and Bill Breckon