Dear Friend,

Whatever happened to Rest and Recreation? In the three months since the end of the 2022 season we thought we might have time to put our feet up for a bit. Well, we seem to be busier than ever! It’s not as if we have any building works this winter, apart from relocating the laundry and opening up the frantoio (the old olive press) ready for its transformation into a stunning new communal space.

But since October our feet do not seem to have touched the ground. Mind you we celebrated our joint 140th birthday, enjoyed a family Christmas in Florence with our two daughters, and in January had an excursion to a little village in Emilia to do some research on the book we are writing on the composer Pietro Mascagni. And we are learning to play bridge.

(L)- Gina relaxing with her pet goat Lucy (probably the first goat ever to star in a Watermill newsletter
(R) - One of Gina’s smart new designs for a Watermill ad

Another pleasant task is that we have been busy processing the record number of bookings for this year’s creative courses. Our thanks to everyone who has booked their place. Your support is much appreciated. We still have a few more spaces left on our painting, knitting and Italian language weeks and there are details and links below.

One of the other reasons we have been busy lately is that we’ve been revamping our social media output on Facebook and Instagram, and so on. Bill confesses that is all a bit of a mystery to him (he was the 80th part of the 140th birthday) with Likes, Followers, Posts, Chats, Forums and the like. So we are very pleased to welcome Gina Shearston to the Watermill team to take over the running of our social media efforts. She is from Mexico, but she lives in a village near the Watermill with her English husband, Simon.

Gina is not only a skilled operator in social media, she’s also a graduate in graphic design. So, she’s been freshening up our content with some cool new designs.

Talking of cool, you may remember that last month we told you about our new project to make the Watermill and our guests ‘plastic neutral’ by removing the equivalent of 40,000 plastic bottles from the worst polluted corners of our world’s oceans. Well, last month we received delivery of our new Ocean Bottles which are helping us in our fight. There’s more about it in the 'A Special Delivery' story below.

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

• Why Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi needs no introduction!
• The latest session of the Watermill’s popular online interactive painting programme
• Artistic cheese sandwich anyone?
• From war-torn regions to peaceful Tuscany. Fiona’s painting adventures
• Knitting and la bella vita. Two different knitting weeks for you to enjoy
• Rewriting is everything  – and it’s hard
• Where do all those Italian surnames come from?

Happy reading!

Thelma and Louise.
We think they might have had
a more peaceful time had they gone
to 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.

A Special Delivery. These bottles will help the Watermill (and you) to be ‘plastic neutral’ this year

They’ve arrived! Lois tells the story:

These Ocean Bottles* will help us helping us in our fight to reduce the pollution of our oceans. As Lois says, we have created a project to collect 450 kg of ocean-bound plastic from the world’s most polluted rivers and waterways this year, and to ensure that it is not dumped into the sea. This is equivalent to around 40,000 single-use half-litre bottles. It means, as Lois said, that the Watermill has become ‘plastic neutral’ by pulling out of the ocean as much as plastic as it uses.

What’s more, every time you fill up with water in the beautiful insulated aluminium flasks (we loan you one for your week with us), you’ll also stop even more plastic polluting the seas. We’ll show you how when you arrive.

The Watermill no longer buys water in plastic bottles. Instead, we’ve invested in a clever water dispenser for our communal kitchen which produces filtered water (at ambient temperature, cold or fizzy.) You can fill up your Watermill Ocean Bottle any time you’d like.

* Ocean Bottle, a British company, works worldwide to bring a ‘people-powered solution to the ocean plastic crisis’. Through the sales of its recyclable insulated bottles, it raises money to pay people to collect plastic in coastal communities where plastic pollution is worst. The company guarantees this collection through regulated waste-management tracking and verification. The plastic collected is recycled and this process is also monitored. Moreover, the company works with local collectors, who exchange plastic for money, helping them to be financially more secure and to gain access to social resources such as healthcare and education. Since launching in 2019, Ocean Bottle has prevented more than seven million kg of ocean-bound plastic from reaching our oceans. That’s equivalent to 636 million plastic bottles.

Currently eight million metric tonnes (8,000 million kg) of plastic winds up in the oceans every year. The Watermill’s contribution may be a drop in the ocean, but it’s important, nonetheless.

Why Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi needs no introduction! And he has a Watermill room named after him...

The Watermill’s Botticelli bedroom

While researching for a recent blog on our Watermill bedrooms, Bill came across a name that is not one to conjure with: Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, also known to his friends as Sandro Little Barrel.

If you’ve never heard of him, you’re not alone. Neither had we – and yet we’ve named one of our Watermill bedrooms after him. Perhaps because he is better known to you and me as Sandro Botticelli. He is most famous for his extraordinary paintings, The Birth of Venus and Primavera, but below you can see another of his masterpieces, The Adoration of the Magi. Most experts agree that the figure on the far right in a golden-brown over-gown is Botticelli himself.

Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi, now the Uffizi gallery, Florence;
Close-up: a self-portrait of Botticelli himself

Lois recently took us on a tour of the lovely Botticelli bedroom:

From the magnificent dome of Florence Cathedral to a busy street in Marrakesh. You’ll see the world when you paint online with us

We are well into the swing of the Watermill’s season of on-line, interactive sessions, with our international guests painting along with our two modern maestri, Randy Hale and Mike Willdridge. We have another session this month to tell you about, but first let’s look at half a dozen or our guests’ beautiful paintings (selected entirely at random) from one of Randy’s previous sessions, the subject of which was Brunelleschi’s cupola of Florence cathedral.

Our next session is with Mike Willdridge, who will show us how to simplify a busy street scene, like the one in Marrakech, Morocco, in Mike’s source photograph on the left below. On the right is Mike’s practice painting of the scene,

Mike says: "The aim of this painting is to simplify a busy scene, especially one with lots of figures. Equally, this will be an exercise in painting strong light and heat and composition. I’d like you to tackle both the drawing and painting during the session and I will show you two possible compositional suggestions (drawings) as well as my practice painting." You will be able to access these line drawings and Mike's painting once you have registered for this session.

Mike will also be using these two Edward Seago paintings as a reference and an inspiration.

Mike’s session is on Thursday 16 February at 4 pm UK time (GMT). Please check the time in your own time zone.). You can register to join him by clicking here.

There will be more Watermill online interactive sessions to come in March, and we will tell you more about those in our next newsletter.

Artistic cheese sandwich anyone?

Picture: The Social Post

We had fun recently reading our favourite online art magazine, DailyArt.com, in which Alexandra Kiely told us about some Italian artists with food in their names.

So how about a little bit of Parmesan cheese, perhaps in a roll? Parmigiana is how they define the famous cheese from Parma, and Parmigianino which we suppose means a little man from Parma, was the nickname of Francesco Mazzola (1503-1540), one of the pioneering artists of the Mannerist style, with its sinuous exaggerations. (Not, Bill says, entirely his cup of tea.)

Parmigianino self-portrait and a Panini ‘postcard’

And with our cheese we must have a roll, in Italian, a panino, plural panini. Enter Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691-1765), a relatively undistinguished Roman painter of ‘views’, picture postcards as it were, to sell to travellers on their Grand Tour. Above right is his 1734 Interior of Pantheon in Rome, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA. The 1523/4 Parmigianino self-portrait is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria.

Alexandra tells us more about foodie artists Carpaccio and Bellini and asks why Bronzino always reminds her of sea bass. Find out why by reading the whole amusing article: just click here.