January 2012. Wow, what a busy Autumn the Art Club has had! First our biggest exhibition yet, with 18 artists exhibiting paintings, sculptures, ceramics and textiles in September, then the massive project of the mural for the LAPS Local Animal Protection Society dogs' home all through the Autumn. During this time we also managed three painting and sketching expeditions in good weather.

The mural was planned and sketched out by myself, then painted by 11 artists in total, over a period of 5 weeks - it took 180 man-hours to complete. LAPS and the Art Club are very pleased with what we achieved, and we enjoyed our write-up in the Round Town News. We featured 21 dogs, some of them actual portraits of dogs rescued and rehomed by LAPS, including 3-legged Lewy. Many thanks to all the artists, especially to Pedro Mateo who supplied most of the paint and many hours, and to Alan and Barbie Rigg who crouched in the cold painting on a record number of sessions, and who kept us well supplied with flapjack!

January 2012

Classes have started again, with Watercolour 2 on Wednesdays in the Social Centre, Rafol, and a new course called Colour and Colour Mixing on Thursday mornings. This course is for artists painting in watercolours, oils or acrylics. There are a couple of places left in each. Classes cost 6 euros for a 2-hour class.

May 2011. The Beginners' and Refreshers' Oils courses are in their eighth week, with some real progress in the techniques of painting in oils. We have painted an African scene, a Bob Ross style mountain and lake scene, and a tropical seascape with sunset. Next a fruity still life! We may well add a couple of weeks to this course as it is proving so successful.  

March 2011. The Drawing and Perspective course was very well subscribed and attended. Students studied and practised many different drawing skills and tackled subjects such as Still Life, landscape in pastel, animal and human figures in charcoal and white pastel on grey paper, pen and ink and perspective of street scenes and buildings.

I will be extending the forthcoming Oils courses by 2 weeks, making them 10 weeks in all. This will give students more opportunities to practise more subjects and more techniques.

December 2010: Our painting club continues to thrive and grow, with new members joining all the time. We are looking forward to our festive party - at the end of January! as some of us are away over Christmas. We're each painting a Christmas or New Year card to draw out of a bag. Each person will also receive a small Art gift from the Club.

The courses on offer for next year are nearly full - Drawing and Perspective, Beginner's Oils, and Beginner's Watercolours. Email me for more information at jantheartist1@yahoo.co.uk

November 2010: I have just got back from Egypt, where we went on the holiday of a lifetime. We saw the most incredible examples of ancient Egyptian monumental building, bas-reliefs and incised wall decorations, painted tombs, statues  stone and gold,and of course Tutankhamun's incredible gold funerary jewellery, thrones, chariots, couches, statues, amulets and sarcophagis, plus that amazing gold mask.

I started a painted journal during our 11-day tour and am still working on it; I will publish it here once it is complete.

October 2010: As a result of our imprssive exhibition recently, 13 new members have joined our group, which we are delighted about. Some have already started attending classes and coming to Art Club, and 5 joined our painting excursion last week to the river at Beniarbeig. Welcome!

Sept- Oct 2010: The 6-week course entitled Better Drawing and Painting developed in an interesting way, as we included chalk and charcoal, pastels, and watercolours. We had a fun taster of a Creative Design course which I am thinking of running.

August 2010: An 8-week course on Figure Drawing and Portraiture held in my house over the summer at the request of member artists was well received, with some lovely work coming out of it. Gladys sold her beautiful chalk and charcoal drawing of a statue of a girl - Congratulations!

 May 2010 -We have now completed the follow-on oils course entitled Paint like the Impressionists, Cubists, Fauves..this was so popular it had to run twice!

 Students enjoyed the presentation on Impressionism and have produced some lovely Monets, Degas, Boudins, and Morisots. Everyone is learning such a lot from these wonderful artists.

The course was repeated from Thursday 1st April, and was fully subscribed. Some real progress was made in everyone's painting. For the next course see the Art Classes page.

December

2009.

December 2009: The 8-week Introduction to oil painting course has just finished, and was a great success - 14 students in two classes have learned how to paint in oils and I have seen real progress in their work.

The follow-on course in January and February will teach them all about Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Abstraction and other modern ways of stylizing their work.

Quite a few paintings have sold recently as Christmas presents, and tomorrow I hope to sell some big cat cards and prints in a Christmas fair.

1st October 2009. During two weeks of torrential rain here in Spain I've painted seven new pictures - see one of them, entitled Infinity, on the roses page on this website.

The 8-week course on oil painting which I will be teaching begins on Monday. There are so many students enrolled that I will probably create two classes.

14th. August 2009 - The Art Club exhibition was a great success with five paintings sold by three artists. Two of them have never even had a painting framed before, so this was a great boost to their confidence. I sold Flamenco Patterns, which hadn't even made it to this website!

The exhibition was extended by a week and we have five new Art Club members enrolled.