Dear Friend,

The Watermill is on holiday, so you might just find us in the walled garden, or the vine verandah, or the riverside terrace, or the millstream, or in the bamboo forest.

Yes, while other people might care to venture bustling historic sites or crowded beaches, our holidays are at the Watermill itself, enjoying the peace and quiet and the the beautiful scenery of Lunigiana which surrounds the mill. We’ll enjoy visits from family and friends, of course, for as Hilaire Belloc has it: “There’s nothing worth the wear of winning than laughter and the love of friends.”

They seek them here; they seek them there. Could that be Lois and Bill (bottom right) taking the last rays of the evening sun at the end of the walled garden?

We had an interesting July (in the sense of that Chinese curse ‘May you live in interesting times’) in that we contracted Covid and had to rush to Florence to isolate for a week, while the magnificent Watermill team did a wonderful job looking after the guests. Then Lois had to have her wisdom teeth extracted, a traumatic and painful operation. That’s why we are going to enjoy a quiet time in the Tuscan countryside, ‘recharging our batteries’ before the second part of the season.

We would love you to join us when we start our creative courses again from 20 August onwards, to find out what’s so special about the ambience of the Watermill and its surroundings. And why, additionally, inspiring tuition, warm hospitality, delicious food and wine and the convivial company of like-minded people combine to make your Watermill week a holiday to remember.

The pictures at the top of this introductory section are by Watermill painting tutors Paul Talbot-Greaves (the road from Posara to Fivizzano) and Rebecca de Mendonça (the valley of the river Rosaro, with Posara in the distance).

Here (below) are four more pictures by Watermill tutors: Varvara Neiman’s stunning evocation of a local market and Mike Willdridge’s delightful watercolour of the millstream bubbling back into the river; Cynthia Armstrong captures the atmosphere of an Italian bakery; Tim Wilmots’ wonderful watercolour of the interior of one of the old mills.

And at the bottom of this introductory section you will find Grahame Booth’s evocative watercolour of a man working on his allotment plus a photo of students soaking up the Italian language under the dappled shade of the Watermill vine verandah.

Why not come and be inspired with us? We still have some places left on our nine remaining courses this year (eight painting and one Italian language) and you’ll find more details and links below.

In this month’s newsletter we also have stories on:

• The amazing Watermill bamboo forest
• Watermill guests go potty at the market
• How the mobile phone helps painting ‘still life’ figures en plein air
• Truthfully poignant observations on youth and old age
• Our remaining inspiring painting weeks in 2022
• Featured painting tutor of the month: Grahame Booth
• Looking forward to our 2023 painting courses make your memories into unforgettable stories
• Get to know your chickens on our Italian language course

Happy reading!

“We must put a week at the Watermill in our diaries,”
Renée Zellweger and Colin Firth
as Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy

Bring a partner:
there's plenty for them to do

They don’t have to participate in the course, but they will be able to enjoy the wonderful hospitality of the mill and, whenever they want, to come out with you to our beautiful locations.

We also offer a range of Alternative activities for partners on all our courses, as well as a generous £GBP 250 discount if they share a room with you.

The amazing Watermill bamboo forest

(Left)Mike Willdridge’s picture of the bamboo forest hangs in the Watermill sitting room gallery
(right) Guests visiting the bamboo forest

On Saturday afternoons during our creative courses, we usually go for a walk through the Watermill grounds and then along the millstream and riverside – and our guests never cease to be amazed at the veritable forest of bamboo that grows beside the river.

It is very Zen-like: very few people go there and bamboo leaves fall silently, creating a rich carpet over the decades. It is a haven for wildlife: badgers, deer, porcupines, wild boar, foxes, to name but a few. We don’t do much to maintain it, just making sure it doesn’t spread too far towards the Watermill grounds and keeping a path clear beneath the towering stalks.

Our guests often ask how it got there, and the answer is simple: in the old days, the villagers had their orti, vegetable plots, in the rich alluvial soil beside the river, and in one corner, they planted a little bamboo, to cut for canes to support their tomatoes and their beans. But in the fullness of time, the old folk died off, the young folk were not interested in working the orti, and the plots were abandoned. And the bamboo grew, and grew, and grew...

As well as providing a wonderfully calm space for our guests to enjoy peace and quiet (apart from the rushing of the river and the clicking of the cicadas), our bamboo forest has proved an inspiration to many of our tutors and artistic guests.

(Left) A bamboo watercolour by Ali Hargreaves;
(Right) Randy Hale's picture of Bill taking a group into ‘a tunnel of green gloom.’

Watermill guests go potty at the market

Our guests on Carl March’s painting week last month went slightly potty. Leastways, they couldn’t resist the stall selling local ceramic bowls. Quite a few of them bought quite a few of the colourfully patterned pottery, which we, incidentally, use to serve the ‘nibbles’ for our evening aperitivi.Rachel Priest, who took the picture, says: “I think most of us are going home with them in our luggage, hopefully arriving in the UK one piece.”

The market always proves a great attraction, not just for its artefacts and local produce (the dried porcini mushrooms are always in demand), but also for the visit to the local gelateria for a lunchtime panino and scoops of delicious home-made ice cream. All this and sketching the market scenes, and painting the view down the valley. And that is just Tuesday on a typical Watermill painting week. Watermill creative courses refresh the parts that other courses cannot reach.

How the mobile phone helps painting ‘still life’ figures en plein air

Watermill tutor Pamme Turner came up with an interesting thought last month on the contribution of the mobile phone to painting and sketching en plein air.

It’s not just that you can take a picture of the scene for future reference but, says Pamme, the mobile phone means that “it is now easy to find life models to draw or paint/work from—just about anywhere!" She adds: “No need any more to search for a seated cafe figure or hire a live figure model to add to your drawings, paintings and artistic compositions.”

The reason is that people’s obsession with looking at their phones “has created a near-frozen aspect to human figures residing in nature—and now has created a fabulous added bonus opportunity for aspiring plein air artists-on-location!”

Pamme has been painting in and around the famous Garibaldi Park/Venice and she says “there are visitors and Venetians frozen in time and place (sometimes for 30-40 minute sessions)— so I’ve filled my notebooks with a fun array of figures, watercolor studies in light and shadow.”

You can see a montage of some of her sketches above, the unmoving humans paired with the Roman-style garden statuary. Pamme asks: “Are the statues the ‘real ones?’ The living people are becoming literal “still lives”— and are painted here, peering at their cell phone screens, in silent contemplation.”

Here (right) is another ‘still life’ by Pamme, of a woman taking a selfie at the famous fish market by the Rialto Bridge in Venice.

Pamme will be at the Watermill next year for her plein air watercolour and gouache painting course. But you have to move to bag your place: six people booked in already. And don’t forget: if you book your place before 1 September 2022 you can enjoy this 2023 course at 2022 prices.

Pamme Turner
20 – 27 May 2023
Watercolour and gouache en plein air
To learn more about Pamme and her course at the mill, please visit her 2023 Profile Page.

Truthfully poignant observations on youth and old age

Rembrandt van Rijn,
wide-eyed and open-mouthed
self-portrait in 1630,
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Readers of the Watermill blogs (click here to read them) will know that as well as giving you news of all the Watermill activities and adventures, we also like to bring you stories about art, architecture and creative writing. We had a fascinating story last month, courtesy of the online DailyArt magazine, about some of Rembrandt’s self-portraits, and we thought we’d share it with you here, in case you missed the blog.

As John Keats told us “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all you know on earth and all you need to know.” Art, too, whether writing or the visual arts, only really succeeds (in my opinion) when it is true, stripped away of self-delusion and artifice. That is why, for me, the self-portraits of Rembrandt are so moving, as they chart relentlessly the artist’s progress from exuberant, expectant youth to tired, disillusioned old age.

So, we were particularly interested in one of the latest stories from the online DailyArt magazine*, in which Zuzanna Stańska looks at some of the 100 or so self-portraits that Rembrandt made during his lifetime. He often used these to explore the effects of light and shade and also, to experiment with facial expressions, as in the drawing above from his early days in Leiden in the 1630s.

And then:

The picture on the left, Self-portrait with Saskia, is from around 1635 and is to be found in, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany. “This is a unique double portrait of Rembrandt and his wife, Saskia, painted in 1635, when he was at the height of his fame and enjoying the happiest time of his life, reflected in this joyful painting.” Their happiness, however, was cruelly curtailed when Saskia died in 1642.

Contrast this picture with the ‘large self-portrait’ of 1652. (Centre, from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany.)

Zuzanna Stańska writes: “This is the first self-portrait Rembrandt painted since 1645. During the previous seven years, he focused instead on landscapes and intimate domestic subjects. 1645 was the year when his financial difficulties began, and he breaks with the sumptuous finery he had worn in previous self-portraits. In composition, it is very different from his previous self-portraits and shows the painter in direct frontal pose, with hands on his hips and an air of self-confidence. That’s a very strong image of a struggling man.”

Finally, Zusanna looks at the self-portrait of 1669, when Rembrandt was 63 years old, probably the last self-portrait he painted (above right, in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands.)

She says: “The expressive freedom of style and fresh gaze shows that Rembrandt was certainly not exhausted at the end of his life. This self-portrait seems to be so real that when I see it I always fear it will start to talk.” I see a querulous and anxious old man — and the truthfulness of that image is moving and beautiful.

*You can see the whole of Zusanna’s article by clicking here.