If you follow me on Instagram you may have seen a lovely reel I made that captures some of the joy and fun we have on the Bloomsbury inspired Four Day Art course.
The course takes place in the depths of our lovely garden, studios and teaching space and it is a warm place to share and be free from the outside world, to make and create around the stories of the legendary Bloomsbury group.
Every year the art course gets more in-depth and rich in experience. I like to start it at the Cabinet Rooms with coffee, croissants and a talk with a presentation to set the scene, context for the Bloomsbury main protagonists.
Coffee, croissants and sketchbooks: The Bloomsbury course always begins at the Cabinet Rooms in Winchester.
Why start at the Cabinet Rooms:
It is Winchester’s own Bloomsbury café with its Charleston house inspired interiors, cocktails and cinema/presentation room. Gary and Marcus are the fabulous duo who have created this haven for all – away from the 9-5 and escape into another time and place. It’s my bit of Paris and I love it so it’s why I start here. Marcus shares my passion for the group, its stories and art so he helps me organise the Charleston House trip to Lewes.
In preparing for the course , every year I reference and gather more and more resources. If you don’t know Virginia Woolf the great modernist writer of our time was Vanessa Bells sister. This year I found a number of quotes from Woolf’s “Oh to be a painter” and I whould like to share this one with you. It’s from the forward to one of Vanessa Bell’s Catalogues, on the importance of painting. It’s so evocative and makes you want to paint it.
“A meaning is given to familiar things that makes them strange. Not a word sounds and yet the room is full of conversations …A plant bends its leaves in the jar and we feel that we too have visited the depths of the sea”.
During this year’s course I started calling my students my Blooms-berries. My Blooms-berries become a community of friends and students who have attended my courses over the years, it’s a special club away from it all, immersed in art. So I planning on making a special pin to give them to wear. I am thinking of a mixture of Suffragette colours (the Bloomsburys were proud supporters of the women’s suffrage) on a blossom and berries. So purple, green and white. I’ll keep you posted on the drawings and ceramic tests.
Surrounded by Bloomsbury-inspired portraits in the Cabinet Rooms’ cinema room, where I set the scene for the course each year.
Gordon Square, London, just steps from where Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and Duncan Grant once lived.
Why Bloomsbury? What’s my connection?
I was drawn to the Bloomsbury story because I spent most of my formative years living in Bloomsbury in London. I left school and went to Hammersmith College to learn I.T. and secretarial skills – I had to earn a living and soon I was a secretary. Feeling unfulfilled, I took evening classes at the City Lit in Printmaking and life drawing. I was building a portfolio to study a foundation course in art and design. My sister Em was on her art course in Hackney, going on art trips and making wonderful A1 sized paintings. Inspired, I decided there and then: I needed to get out of the 9-5 and pursue a career in art. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lovely time starting as office junior and then progressing to PA to John Horne, Barrister. I can see him in his white straw hat, a gentleman who worked alongside Lee Winetroube (a mentor to me in the early days), a wonderfully tall and strong woman. She often had Maureen Lipman ringing her up for a natter. They were happy for me. So, in that summer of 1992 I left the Bar Council with the beautiful drawing pens they gave me and set out to be a painter.
Sitting in Bloomsbury Square on the grass with my siblings I was minutes away from Gordon Square and the homes where Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and Duncan Grant lived. It was there I opened my letter of acceptance to study a fine art degree at college in Bath – the former Bath Academy in Corsham where some of the great artists I admired emerged. Painters like Howard Hodgkin, Peter Lanyon and Gillian Ayres. Everything would change. At 23 I was going back to school – I would leave London for the second time in my life and at Bath I would have a room of my own for the first time. But more of that another time.
First Dibs – The Bloomsbury Dates for 2027 are:-
Friday 30th July – Monday 2nd August 2027
Email me to book a place on the course
My Blooms-berries — this year’s course group with sketchbooks full of colour after four days of drawing and painting together.
