Donegal Days…
Keeping in mind the ISBA’s mission statement “to facilitate interaction amongst botanical artists in Ireland” we decided to run a bi-annual painting weekend in the north west for our members. Here, Oonagh Phillips fills us in on the latest of these weekends which happened recently.
Our Donegal Painting Weekend group has just enjoyed its fourth session, this time at The Glebe in Churchill. This time we welcomed three Donegal-based artists and five others from Wicklow, Kildare and Dublin.
Our day begins at 10am with a walk in the beautiful woodland gardens beside Lough Gartan to choose our plants, and everyone gets down to work straight away.
Curator Adrian Kelly couldn’t be more accommodating and drops in a couple of times a day to see if we have everything we need and we do! Each person brings a packed lunch and there is tea and coffee on the go throughout the day so we can have a break to discuss our work and have a chat.
Niamh Harding Millar, professional art teacher and one of our group, kindly offered a watercolour and colour pencil session this time. She brought colour charts and talked to anyone who had questions on colour theory, thanks so much to Niamh for doing that.
Our next session will take place at The Glebe on May 6 and 7, 2017 and is available to all members. This event is free of charge.
Beautiful art work, the red salvia ! (?) flower in water glass is lovely and so different.
I hope I get to see your finished aster little Carlow Niamh, which is not so little and I can give some roots away.
I recall on one of the previous trips to Donegal, how willing and knowledgeable you were with any art theme.
The beautiful autumnal leaf reminds me of the wonderful colours we don’t always appreciate. With such a group of you there must have been a fair bit of fun too.