Dear Friend,

By the time you read this, we will be well into our 20th creative course of the season, a watercolour painting week with Grahame Booth, and more than 200 people will have enjoyed one of our relaxing and inspiring courses. It’s been hard work but well worth it and we have had marvellous feedback from our guests. For example, Diana Springall, who came on one of Mike Willdridge’s watercolour courses last month, wrote on Tripadvisor: "Bill and Lois have created a truly inspirational and magical place in which to participate in art classes. Every need is taken care of and there were lovely trips out to paint. The meals were beautifully prepared, the rooms were immaculate and the whole experience was one that was wrapped in generosity.”

Thank you, Diana. We are trying to create a warm and welcoming centre of artistic excellence, where our guests have to worry about nothing other than enlivening their creativity.

Watermill tutor Pamme Turner’s
watercolour sketch
captures the ambience of the mill

Another guest, Suzanne West, wrote: “The Watermill itself is the most amazing place. Each room interior has been carefully worked out showing appreciation of texture and colour and at same time providing every comfort. The landscape setting of the Watermill from its flowing waterfalls, very attractive gardens and amazing creative props ensure provision for artistic scope. There is also the added pleasure of frequent painting trips to exciting locations. The meals provided were of the best, beautifully prepared and a constant state of pleasant surprise. Bill and Lois have surpassed themselves in creating a place with truly magical content.”

If you would like to find out what all the fuss is about, have a look at the Watermill website by clicking here. And don’t forget we have an Early Bird offer of £75 (British pounds) off the cost of your course, if you book before the end of the year. There are more details below. Come and join us for inspirational teaching, warm hospitality, beautiful surroundings, delicious food and wine and, of course, the convivial company of like-minded people.

The two lovely pictures of the Watermill (above ) were taken by Katie Guest, who also had charming things to say about her stay: “It is such a lovely place, so peaceful and picturesque. You have done an amazingly great renovation job, executed with such taste ! The food was great and you were such perfect hosts.” As Brits, we feel a little embarrassed by all this praise but, to mix our metaphors: you shouldn’t hide your light under a bushel and, as our American friends say, if you don’t blow your own trumpet, who will?

The two pictures below show how easy it is to become totally absorbed in your hobby on a Watermill painting course. You will spend hours concentrating in the sunshine or in dappled shade, before being summoned by Bill’s bell for another delicious meal......

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

• World Bamboo Day
• Nobel prize-winning scientist is in hot water over pasta-cooking advice
• Hats off for a fun look at headgear in art
• Lesley helps our guests make a fresh start to the day
• How to sign up for our next online painting session
• Painting tutors of the month: Herman Pekel and James Willis
• Dates and links for all our 2023 creative courses
• Why reading out loud improves your writing
• Why the Italians can’t see the time to look forward

Happy reading!

“Why don’t we stop fighting
and enjoy a relaxing week
at the Watermill?”

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.

Picture: Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen - Everett Collection

The Early Birds are flying in

These early birds look a little more loving
than Bogart and Hepburn
in the picture above!

We hope you are looking forward to a creative 2023. We are certainly doing that here at the Watermill, with an exciting array of tutors, including new talents and old friends, for the coming year. (Details and links below.)

Now really is the time for you to sign up for one of the Watermill’s world-renowned creative courses – painting, creative writing, knitting and Italian language – especially as we have now launched our end-of-year Early Bird offer. It will run from now until 31 December 2022.

Yes, there is a £75 (British pounds) discount on every one of our 2023 creative holidays and it really is time for you to book your place. All told, there are about 250 places on our 22 courses next year – and some 160 of them have already been booked up.

You can find everything about everything on the Watermill website. Please just click here. When you have decided from the Tutor Profiles on the Watermill’s Website, just go to the Booking Enquiry form and select your tutor. And in the Comment section just write ‘I claim my £75 Early Bird discount’ and we’ll make sure you receive our special offer.

An excuse to show you Mike Willdridge’s wonderful bamboo picture again

We’ll bet you didn’t know that 18 September was World Bamboo Day. Neither did we until we read a little posting online: "Today we celebrate World Bamboo Day, established in 2009 to focus on this useful and versatile plant that blooms in East Asia. Although bamboo can grow up to 30 meters in height it does not classify as a tree since it is actually a grass. Bamboo is strong and durable, so it can be used to make almost anything from clothes to building materials, while sprouts can be eaten...You may not know it, but there may be a bamboo forest around you, too."

Well, there is a bamboo forest around us – and we know it! It’s grew up many decades ago after the deaths of the old villagers, who had established vegetable plots between the river and the millstream, and who had grown a little bamboo in one corner to cut for supports for their tomatoes and beans.

The younger villagers who remained (many had left to seek work elsewhere) were seemingly uninterested in horticulture by the river, and the plots were abandoned. The bamboo grew and grew, so now we have veritable forest, hardly visited by anyone but ourselves and our Watermill guests. It has a wonderful zen feeling as you walk beneath the towering canes on a soft carpet of generations of fallen bamboo leaves.

But our chief reason to tell you about World Bamboo Day is that it gives us an excuse to show you again Mike Willdridge’s magnificent watercolour of the sun shining through the bamboo forest which now hangs in the painting gallery Watermill sitting room.

Come and see for yourself, both the painting and the forest, on a Watermill course. You’ll love them.

Mike Willdridge
9 - 16 September 2023 - still plenty of places
Watercolours and drawing (also gouache and acrylics)
To learn more about Mike and his course at the mill, please visit his 2023 Tutor Profile Page.

Nobel prize-winning scientist is in hot water over pasta-cooking advice

Cookidoo

While the world worries about the cost-of-living crisis, the energy crisis, the global-warming crisis and every other crisis that journalists scare us with daily, Italians have been having a heated argument on the subject they all know best: the cooking of food, particularly pasta. And a Nobel prize-winning Italian physicist has found himself in hot water for giving advice on how to cook pasta – and save energy.

Professor Giorgio Parisi advised: "Put the pasta in a pan of boiling water, bring it back to the boil, then turn the gas off (or at least turn it down as far as possible)".

That got the cooks in a tizz. The pasta will go all gooey said one leading chef, Antonello Colonna, while another, Luigi Pomata, says the method would be ‘a disaster’ and advised the physicist : “If you want to turn down the heat, keep out of the kitchen.”

But while the chefs threw up their hands in horror, Tom Kington reported in The Times, the Nobel laureate had support from fellow scientists, including some in the pasta industry itself. A chemistry professor from Como, Dario Bressanini, points out: “Key processes that occur during pasta cooking, including the absorption of water by starch and the coagulation of gluten, all happen at 80C, so it doesn’t depend on the water boiling.” He adds: “As long as you cover the pan after turning off the gas, the water temperature can still be above 85C after 15 minutes. The pasta doesn’t stick if you use quality pasta with 13 per cent gluten content.”

would these Italian chefs
turn down the heat on their pasta?
I doubt it!

Unione Italiana Food, which represents the industry, is supportive, suggesting that using Parisi’s method could save as much as 47% of the energy normally used. And as an analogy they bring in another subject dear to Italians’ hearts: football. If the whole country followed Giorgio Parisi’s advice for a year, enough energy would be saved to power the lights of every football stadium in Europe for 24 years!

That may be so, but we think it’s going to be an uphill to persuade Italian chefs and housewife/husband like to change the pasta-cooking ways.

Hats off for a fun look at headgear in art

Pictures Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA,
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA, Private Collection

Was it Oscar Wilde who said that you should take flippant things seriously and serious things flippantly? Well, it’s certainly true that we often take art criticism rather seriously, so in this month’s newsletter, courtesy of Daily Art online magazine, we’re going to be slightly flippant about art, or rather about hats in art. There’s a fun article by Magda Michalska on that very subject and we thought we might share a head-topping image or three with you.

We’ve never it seen before, but we rather like Rembrandt’s elegant older man, featherly be-hatted above left. Magda says: “I love Rembrandt’s paintings; he was a master of portraiture and fluffy hats in art! He made many self-portraits, always posing in a different hat. This time, however, he painted an elderly but still handsome man, who might have held a high-rank position (look at his fur coat!) in the military, as he was wearing a gorget, that is a steel collar designed to protect the throat.”

We’re not too sure how seriously we would take his orders with that black feather waving in the breeze before us – and we are not quite sure what to make of this moustache hat (centre, above) by Jean Arp. Is it Dada or simply gaga?

Finally, any article about hats could not be without a René Magritte bowler. There’s another enigmatic one (right, above).

Our thanks to Magda for her not-too-serious article, where you can see more hats and which you can read by clicking here.

Speaking of hats, below left are some ladies on a Watermill painting course enjoying convivial conversation in a local café. We would love you to join us for one of our famous relaxing and inspiring creative courses next year, and we will even loan you sun hats (below right) if you’ve forgotten yours.

Lesley helps our guests make a fresh start to the day

Watermill guest Lesley Dench added an extra attraction to the Watermill painting course she attended a week or so ago: gentle pre-breakfast tai chi exercises on the roof terrace overlooking the mill walled garden.

How to sign up for our next online painting session

As soon as our courses here at the mill finish at the end of October, we begin our online Zoom paint sessions. The plan is to have two or more sessions each month, and the first is with Randy Hale on Thursday 3 November. You will find full details (and be able to sign up) here.

Mike Willdridge will lead the next session on Thursday 17 November and you can sign up here. For more details of forthcoming sessions, please visit our Online Courses Page.