The Cornish landscape provides the perfect backdrop for enthusiastic painters - not to say fans of the BBC drama and Aidan Turner
Here's the start of an excellent account by Caroline Davidson of her painting course run by the Newlyn School of Art headed up by Henry Garfitt.
"Although I have found a solitary spot there are nine others around me, each of them attempting to get comfortable on prickly, precipitous ground. We are here on a three-day outdoor Coast Painting course provided by Newlyn School of Art – an art school in the fishing port of Newlyn, near Penzance. Established in 2011, the school is founded on Newlyn’s heritage as an artists’ colony. Just as in the early 1900s, today artists in this area are two-a-penny, drawn here by the sea, the furrowed land and each other. Newlyn School of Art taps into this community, employing more than 30 of Cornwall’s professional artists as tutors on short, non-residential courses.
On the Coast Painting course, our expert artist-tutor is Paul Lewin, a landscape painter with a gentle demeanour and a mean handle on paint. “Let the paint do what paint does,” says Paul during a demonstration at the start of the course. “Think about the substance you’re painting and how it behaves,” he adds, flicking watercolour onto paper, apparently arbitrarily but so that it lands just so."