No meeting on 3 May 2012

There will be no TAG meeting on Thurs 3 May, as the Llanfach is being used as a polling station.

Don't forget to do some painting at home!

Dr Brian Davies' talk "A Blue Story"

In a fascinating and impeccable presentation, Dr Davies took us through the story of the colour blue in human affairs, ranging from woad and indigo in pre-history through Prussian blue, Egyptian blue, copper salts, cobalt blue, true and French ultramarine, and thepthalocyanines.

He touched on the chemistry and history of painting and dyeing, and his range of characters included Julius Caesar, Vermeer, Horatio Nelson and Dame Edna Everidge. Totally absorbing.

Painting birds in pastel with Karen Davies

On 1 March Karen visited us to talk about pastel techniques in general, and gave a demonstration of the first stages of painting a lapwing.

Karen works mostly on paper, white and tinted, but also showed us a striking image made on slate. She prefers to start at the top of a picture and work downwards, to avoid smudging the lower parts. To fix intermediate stages she uses hair spray, which is much cheaper than  pastel sprays. One unexpected technique was to spray cooking oil lightly over parts of the pastel to increase density of tone.

Members of the Group pastelling (and chatting)

In her demonstration she showed how to use photographic references culled from magazines, but pointed out that slavishly copying from a copyrighted image was bad form and probably illegal – one should construct ones own picture.

The early stages of Karen's demonstration picture

Note added 25 April: You can see some pictures of birds made by members by clicking on the "Galleries" tab above.

Multitasking artists

Marion and John exhibiting their exemplary brushwork last night.

Illustrated lecture on composition by Jean Napier

Juliet welcomed Jean as our first visiting speaker of the year. Whilst we were waiting for the lecture proper to start at 7 pm, Jean played a slide show of wonderful images of puffins on Skomer.

She then dealt with the main principles of composition, starting with the Fibonacci series and the "rule of thirds". She used as examples some of her own photographs, and explained potential pitfalls to avoid.

Over refreshments we had a lively dialogue: Jean had brought in mounted examples of a range of her fine photographs, and we were asked to identify our favourite and least favourite images, and to explain our reasons. It was fascinating to see that the same image could be rated high and low by different members. The main reason for favouring a particular photo was that it chimed with happy memories of favourite places and themes.

Sylvia concluded the evening by delivering an enthusiastic vote of thanks.

New gallery

We're now loading some examples of our work on the new gallery pages. Just click on the "Gallery" tab above to see them.

Collage evening

Beryl started us off creating collages by showing us some of her work (one done in the '60s when she was tutored by the late Richard Hamilton), and then we got straight down to it. The meeting was so well attended there was hardly room to glue.

Next week we have a break from practical work – an illustrated lecture by the well-known photographer Jean Napier.

A stuck-up lot: some of group experimenting with glue and paper.
Thanks to Dot for the photo.