Adventurous Watercolours
a 2 hour DVD with artist Jenny Wheatley
Jenny Wheatley is known for her exciting, colourful and highly original paintings. Her love of Matisse is obvious in her use of colour and the enthusiasm that she shows when responding to gorgeous colour combinations as she paints. In the first half of the video she is in the French countryside sketching buildings and villages. The small sketches are in pencil in her sketchbook, the larger sketches – she adds watercolour to in layers starting wet-into-wet and then with more hard edged details, going from the general to the specific. She then takes the drawings, the watercolour sketches and her experience of having looked that closely at the buildings – all back to the studio where she spends the second half of the video painting two large finished paintings. She shows how she makes her own watercolours, blots off much of the paint to create a weathered texture and how she continues until she has created some lovely work. I would sum up her style as experimental, flowing painting on top of a rigorously drawn structure.
I noted that in the video she mentions her love of handmade watercolour papers – for their toughness so she can scrub at them, for their heavy weight so she doesn’t need to stretch the paper and for the sumptuous texture of the surface. She particularly mentions a handmade rag paper from India. I don’t know which one she uses but Jackson’s stock two makes of handmade rag paper from India: Jackson’s Handmade Eco Paper in pads and sheets and Khadi Handmade Paper.
Publisher’s summary of the DVD:
Painting and travelling widely in search of subject matter, Jenny is one of the most distinctive of watercolourists, producing colourful and highly original paintings. In this film she paints and draws in and around Vence in the south of France. While some of these paintings are complete in their own right, her experiences in France also lead her to paint and discuss two larger watercolours that she puts together in the studio.
Jenny Wheatley
Jenny Wheatley RWS- NEAC trained at West Surrey College of Art and Design gaining a BA Hons in Fine Art Painting/Printmaking in 1981. Her exhibitions include showing in the RA Summer Show, at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Scottish Gallery, Royal West of England Academy, British Contemporary watercolours, International Contemporary Art Fair Olympia, Watercolours and Works on Paper, and the Chelsea Art Tair. Jenny Wheatley’s annual show at Llewellyn Alexander Gallery at Waterloo in London is set for its opening on 11th February 2015 and this will run until March. They describe the show: “Bright, spontaneous watercolours and oils by one of Britain’s most exciting colourists.”
Jenny Wheatley teaches regularly on painting holidays.
Adventurous Watercolours book
Jackson’s stock the companion book to this DVD Adventurous Watercolours by Jenny Wheatley.
Click on the underlined link to go to the current offer on the DVD Adventurous Watercolours on the Jackson’s Art Supplies website.
Postage on orders shipped standard to mainland UK addresses is free for orders of £39.
Image at the top is a detail of a watercolour painting “House of Cards” by Jenny Wheatley from the video.
