During our Saturday workshop at Art House, South Brent with Suzy, we will be practising the watercolour techniques of brush drawing, colour mixing, wet and dry application, motif copying, texture and tone and observation using our foraged hedgerow plants and flowers. We will consider the compositional work of water-colourist, Elisabeth Blackadder and then move on to composing and painting our own hedgerow composition as our final piece

During our Friday Sun printing workshop at Palstone with Anna, we will be gathering plants and flowers from our local Devon hedgerows. We will be making light sensitive emulsions using our foraged hedgerow plants and coating substrates to make photographic papers. Using botanical emulsions made from scratch on site, as well as a pre-prepared mineral emulsion, we’ll make unique images by exposing the paper to sunlight. You’ll be learning about eco photography as we explore these processes and make a variety of temporary and permanent images. 

Suzy was born in London and trained at Wimbledon School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools graduating in 1998. She  has lived in South Devon for many years, currently based on the edge of Dartmoor. An elected member of the Royal Watercolour Society, her paintings have been exhibited around the UK including at The Royal Academy Summer exhibitions, The Sunday Times Watercolour competition, Lyn Painter Stainers prize and Discerning Eye exhibitions. Pictures were recently licensed for the newly refurbished suites at London's Dorchester hotel on the theme of the English garden.

For further information please visit her website at www.suzyfasht.com

“ I work in oils, watercolour and egg tempera which allow me to vary the scale and degree of detail in my work.  My paintings respond to the natural world around me: the flowers I grow; the woods, moor and coastal paths where I walk. I respond to the seasons, encapsulating what’s happening in the hedgerows and landscape around me. Scale is an important theme and the vantage point of being inside the view, surrounded by plants as if I was a small animal, or suggesting the vastness of a view, such as in paintings of Dartmoor.  Pattern, and the formal aspects of painting such as composition and colour harmony, are also very important to me.

Lately I have been focusing more on close ups of entangled flowers, in particular wild flowers or weeds - noticing the impact of the unpredictable weather each year on what is thriving or not.  The precariousness of our lives reflected in the short lived beauty of a flower”.. Suzy.