Rachel Cronin
Classes and Workshops 2025
Approaches to Abstraction: Exploring Shape and Colour
Venue: Rode Hall, Cheshire, ST7 3QP
Thursday 12th, Friday 13th and Saturday 14th June, 2025
£485 including lunch and some materials
If you’ve wanted to create more abstract work and are interested in exploring new approaches to contemporary landscape painting, then this workshop is just for you.
You will spend three days receiving structured tuition on both the formal elements of making art like colour, tone, pattern and shape and the exciting ways you can break the rules of landscape painting. Because abstract painting is such a broad subject the focus will be on abstract use of colour and simplification of form and composition in this workshop.
On day one you will begin with some expressive landscape sketches and then practice editing, simplifying and reconfiguring elements of sketches to create several vibrant collages that simplify and abstract the landscape.
The first morning will be spent gathering information from the grounds of the beautiful Rode Hall by experimenting with several expressive drawing techniques such as using our non-dominant hand, blind contour drawing and continuous line drawings.
We will take ourselves on a colour finding walk and use our pencils and crayons to create collage papers of the shades and moods that we find in our venue.
I will also talk you through an exercise that encourages you to focus on mass, shape and line so that you begin to think about your paintings as an arrangement of differently scaled elements rather than trees, flowers and borders.
During the afternoon we will explore how different shapes relate to each other by using our collage papers and sketches to create new compositions.
We will then select a couple of our sketches and work these up into a painting using a wooden painting panel that will be supplied. I will demonstrate ways of working with a limited palette of acrylics so that you can create the colours you want from your paints, paying particular attention to saturated and desaturated colours.
You will receive guidance on both how to start and how to build up a painting by creating textures that give your work a sense of history and depth.
For more information about this beautiful venue, please visit the Rode Hall website
