Dear Friend,

We had an amazing season of creative courses at the Watermill this year: 238 guests in total, on 21 courses, almost up to pre-Covid levels. So, a very big thank you to all of you who came on our creative weeks, particularly those whose arrival had been delayed by the pandemic, in some cases by couple of years! Your support is much appreciated.

And a big thank you to the wonderful Watermill staff, who worked tirelessly to make everyone’s stay really special. A round of applause, please, for Kaoutar, Ombretta, Luisa, Marwa, Karsten and Flavio; and also to our drivers Paolo and Luca.

Who knows the future will bring, but bookings for next season currently look very healthy. More than 180 people have already reserved a place on one of our painting, creative writing, knitting or Italian language courses for 2023. That means that there are only 70 or so places left. So, we can say with hand on heart ‘Book now, to avoid disappointment!’ And don’t forget we have an Early Bird offer of £75 (British pounds) off the cost of each of our 2023 creative courses course, if you book before the end of the year. As ever you can find details of all our courses below, with links to the appropriate pages on our website.

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.

Two more delightful demos from Watermill travel journal tutor Cynthia Armstrong.
She’ll be back next year. Details below

We are not going to be idle during the winter months. There will be maintenance, renovation and improvement at the mill itself and we’re going to be running another series of Watermill online, interactive painting sessions. There more news about our interactive Zoom! sessions below and we will regularly update the online section of the Watermill website, which you can see by clicking here.

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

• why we should appoint Randy Hale as our new PR man
• what is the point of George Seurat’s Sunday in the park
• lots of fun activities for our non-participating partners
• by popular demand, another knitting week for Georgia Farrell
• welcome to our tremendous new painting tutor Fiona Graham-Mackay
• add Spice to your writing life with Jo Parfitt
• why our language course is truly suitable for all levels

Happy reading!

The pictures above and below this introductory section were made by Ruth Korch, celebrating her week with us, teaching our guests on her course how to keep an illustrated travel journal.

“Let’s go to the Watermill
and be looked after
as to the manor born.”

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: Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles in The Manor Born. Credit: BBC TV

Join the international community of online painters with the Watermill

The Watermill’s series of online, interactive painting sessions has been extremely successful in bringing together hundreds of people to paint along at home with our inspiring Watermill tutors. We have participants from all over the world, creating a truly international ‘virtual’ community of like-minded people enjoying an inspiring and relaxing time in each other’s company.

We started up the sessions again this month and we would love you to come and join us. And when you’ve enjoyed your ‘virtual’ paint-alongs, we hope it will encourage you to reserve your place on one of the ‘real things’, a week-long painting course at the Watermill itself.

The next online session is with our friend and Watermill tutor, Mike Willdridge, who would like to invite you for a family walk in the autumn woods.

a demonstration watercolour
by Mike Willdridge
of the lane from the Watermill
to the village of Posara

Have you ever wanted to introduce figures into your landscape painting to bring everything to life? Mike will help you to do just that. You can paint along with him online, introducing enlivening figures into an Autumn landscape scene, just like Mike’s practice watercolour above. Mike’s online session is on Thursday 17 November and it starts at 2:30 pm UK time (GMT). Please check what this means in your own time zone. You can sign up by clicking here.

When you’ve painted with Mike online, why not join him for real at the Watermill next autumn? We would love to welcome you here. You can find more details of Mike’s week-long course, which runs from 9 - 16 September 2023, by clicking here.

Mike is followed by Randy Hale, with whom you will be painting the dramatic picture below, which he calls "Arctic Ice". He says: "This is a great exercise in how to work with cool colors, movement & action, and negative space."

Randy’s online session is on Thursday 1 December and it starts at 3:30 pm UK time (GMT). Please check what this means in your own time zone. You can sign up by clicking here. Please note that the start time is different from Mike’s, to allow more of our American friends take part in real time.

For those of you who cannot join in real time (timings are not so good for those of you in Australia), don't worry: all registrants will be sent the link to a video of the session for you to follow at your leisure.

When you’ve painted with Randy online, why not join him for real at the Watermill next Spring? We would love to welcome you here. You can find more details of Randy’s week-long course, which runs from 13 - 20 May 2023, by clicking here. His week is already fully booked but we do sometimes get cancellations so it is worth being on the waiting list.

You can keep up-to-date at all our Watermill online, interactive sessions, by clicking here.

Ever helpful.
Randy and a painting guest
in the Watermill studio

Why we should appoint Randy Hale as our new PR man

When we tell you how wonderful the Watermill and what inspirational fun our creative courses are, I’m sure some of you say: ‘Well, they would say that wouldn’t they? They own the place!’ So, we are pleased when other people feel as enthusiastic as we do and share their love of the Watermill in generous ‘thank you’ notes or Tripadvisor reviews.

One such is painting tutor Randy Hale who, when recently asked by someone interested in coming on his course here, took the trouble to compose the detailed reply below, outlining a typical Watermill painting week. And he sent pictures, too! All are paintings of the Watermill and its surroundings, made by Randy during one or other of his courses here.

Here’s Randy’s report:

The setting is reminiscent of a beautifully appointed villa or estate. You’ll find The Watermill nestled alongside a rushing millstream and the entire estate is surrounded by a thick bamboo forest...yet we're up in the mountains! Each day right after breakfast we are taken to uniquely different painting locations around this mountainous northern part of Tuscany. We see Italy as a local would - without the intrusion of tourists. Where we are is more remote - so a collection of small towns & villages, convents and castles - quite different from tourist spots like Florence, Rome, Cinque Terre.

When we come back from a day of painting, there’s time to freshen up but then the entire group gathers under the garden’s grape arbour for aperitivi and conversation. 30 minutes later we are heading into the dining room for another amazing dinner. Afterwards we adjourn to the sitting room for limoncello, coffee or tea.

In the sitting room there’s a ‘rogue’s gallery’ of paintings hanging salon-style on all the walls. It’s a collection of work from all their tutors - of demos painted during workshops over the years from painting locations our hosts have scouted out and arranged for their guests.

Usually the first day (because folks have been travelling and may be a bit tired) we paint on the grounds of The Watermill — an abundance of subject matter — buildings, millstones, carboys staged in the courtyard, down by the water’s edge, or views into the bamboo jungle.

The next day our group is taken about 10 minutes above Posara (above the town of Fivizzano) where we tour an untouched Castello della Verrucola and also paint. Lunch is a fuori, served by the family that runs a small cafe there - another incredible meal! (And plenty of crisp cool wine.)

Midweek we are at Market Day in the town square of Fivizzano (5 minutes above Posara). It goes until noon. Afterwards we paint more scenes from Fivizanno.

Halfway thru the week there’s a field trip by train to Vernazza in Cinque Terre (or to the walled city centre of Lucca). Lots of sightseeing, some sketching, and a seaside luncheon under the umbrellas!

Later in the week we’re taken to a nearby monastery — Convento del Carmine with its cloisters.

And we also discover a remote medieval village high up in the clouds with the Apuan Alps, the marble mountains of Carrara, in the background.

Each location includes amazing luncheons prepared by locals wherever we are painting. As they say - there’s no bad food in Italy, but these lunches are simply beyond expectations! And such social affairs...

The rear side of the Watermill.
The studio looks over the
gardens and river

There’s also time to touch-up or finish paintings in the Watermill’s art studio when we return each afternoon. It's an airy spacious studio built above the original stone mill. It’s soaring cathedral ceiling is about 25 ft high; both sides of the room include sets of 7 ft windows that open up for mountain breezes to flow thru while we work, allowing the sound of rushing water from the stream below to fill the air.

Each room, suite, or apartment is uniquely appointed. Various rooms can accommodate different size groups such as more extended family, or two individuals traveling together, or spouses. The entire villa has been totally modernized with air conditioning and the latest amenities.

One of our favourite pictures
of the warm and welcoming Watermill courtyard
by tutor Brienne Brown

It’s quite a set-up. Lois and Bill Breckon have been working on this place and improving it every year since they purchased the property over 30 years ago.

And if you click on PROGRAMMES, https://watermill.net/painting-holidays/painting-holidays-programme-2023.php you'll be introduced to ALL the different tutors Bill and Lois bring to the Watermill each season.

Well, we couldn’t have put it better ourselves. That’s why we think that maybe we should employ Randy as our PR man, as well as a painting tutor! We thank him for his enthusiastic support. Why not come next year and see what all the fuss is about?

What is the point of George’s Sunday in the Park?

Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884,
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Once or twice a month we enjoy passing on fascinating snippets of artistic information from the DailyArt online magazine in our Watermill blogs (you can see a new blog almost every day at https://watermill.net/millblog/). Since our blog audience and our newsletter audience are slightly different, we thought we would share this story with you, in case you missed it. This is Bill’s blog article.

The iconic picture above, George Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte, is, I suppose, the prime example of pointillisme, the painting style which attempted systematically to apply optical science to art, making our perception of colour brighter and more powerful.

Small brushstrokes and, later, tiny individual dots of a single colour, are ‘blended’ by the viewer’s own eye and brain into a brighter array of tones than could be achieved in the colour mixed by the artist himself. Seurat preferred to call his technique ‘chromo-luminarism’, alluding to colour and light. While he had a few followers, like Signac and, occasionally, Pissarro, pointillisme soon became an artistic cul-de-sac, but nonetheless it has left quite an impression on the history of art. (To be pedantic the painting is Post-Impressionist, but this is neither the time nor the place for such splitting of hairs.)

It took Seurat two years to paint A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and he made numerous drawings and sketches before he began. As Zuzanna Stańska says in a recent article in the online DailyArt magazine (DailyArtMagazine.com): “He would alter the grouping of people, the number of people within a group and where each group or individual were positioned until he was satisfied that he had achieved the perfect balance.” Even so, there is a curious rigidity about many of the figures. When the painting was shown at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, one critic unkindly compared them to ‘tin soldiers’, and you can see his point. Most of them are looking in the same direction, and there’s little eye contact between.

This regimented stiffness, and the lack of facial expressions, has led some art historians to suggest that, far from painting a simple scene of Parisians enjoying their day off, Seurat was making a point about fin de siècle French society. Are some of the 48 subjects in the painting not quite what they seem ?

What on earth, for instance, is that woman in the right foreground doing with a monkey on a leash? An unusual pet to take for a walk, so why did Seurat include her? A explanation is that one of the French words for monkey, singesse, is also slang for a prostitute

Similarly, what about the woman fishing in the river? The verb ‘to fish' is pêcher, while pécher means ‘to sin.’ Were these covert criticisms of a hypocritical society?

I hope you have enjoyed my musings, but while it is fascinating to speculate on the hidden symbolism of Seurat’s painting, it is important not get bogged down in pedantic conjecture.

Great art should communicate first and foremost on an emotional level and A Sunday Afternoon...does just that. My thanks to Zuzanna for pointing me in the right direction!

Non-Participating Partners have fun too!

(Left) Vernazza
(Right) This Lucca square echoes the shape of the old Roman amphitheatre

While his wife Alison was painting with Grahame Booth on his creative week last month, Greg Cokorinos enjoyed a breath-taking walk, taking in three villages of the beautiful Cinque Terre, with magnificent views over the Mediterranean… The day before both of them had gone to the quintessential Italian city of Lucca on the Watermill’s Wednesday excursion...

The thousand-year-old vineyard
in the hilltop village of Monte dei Bianchi

A couple of weeks earlier, non-painting partner Bill Durias enjoyed swapping wine-making lore with a local vineyard owner, while the painting group captured the magnificent mountains of the Apuan Alps with their brushes...

Yes, Watermill creative course guests often bring their partners on their week-long courses at the mill. We call them NPPs, Non-Participating Partners, spouses or friends who come with the guests on our creative courses, but do not participate in the painting, writing, knitting or Italian language sessions during the week.

We have plenty of optional alternatives for them, including fishing and tennis, vineyard visits and clifftop excursions, enigmatic statues in the mediaeval castles… you can find out more by clicking here.

It’s a hard life being an NPP!

But many of our NPP’s prefer simply to go out with their partners to our stunning locations and enjoy the wonderful scenery. Or, perhaps like Sandy, Peter and Steve (below), NPPs on Ali Hargreaves’ painting course last year, soak up some sun in the Watermill’s walled garden, enjoying a good book, before joining their partners for lunch at the Watermill or in a charming local restaurant.

Come and find out for yourself. The sun-lounger cushions await! There’s more about everything on the Watermill website. Just click here.