Art Studio Ramblings · No. 1

Summer 2026 at the barn

The plein air days, the paintings that won, and a holiday notebook. Everything here is bigger than it was in the letter — tap any photograph.

Competition

What won, and why

Worth a long look before you start this month’s brief. Two of the beach pictures below do the difficult thing it asks for: people in the picture without a single face painted — three or four strokes each, and suddenly the beach has someone on it.

August · Artist of the Month

Cindy — and three in a row

Not one painting. She took work begun in sessions home and finished three in succession, which is a harder habit to build than any technique. Most of us have a drawer of nearly-done.

Arthur’s door was the standout. The whole picture turns on one decision — how dark to make the near things. Door and arch go almost black, worked thick enough to count the studs; the sea through the gap is thin, pale and smooth. That distance between them is what makes the light read as light. It takes nerve, because the dark has to go further than feels comfortable before the bright starts to sing.

A figure and a dog on wet sand at low tide, headland beyond — **Cindy** · two figures, a few dark marks — and the beach has a size

A bodyboarder coming out of the surf beneath a cliff — **Cindy** · the bodyboarder, out of the surf

Roger's framed watercolour: a lone figure on a rocky path, trees overhead, mist beyond — **Roger** · June winner — one figure, and the whole path leads to them

Roger's beach scene from above: tiny walkers and dogs on wet sand, surf beyond, thrift in the foreground — **Roger** · special mention — this month’s brief, already painted

Film

Inside the Children’s Book Workshop

Three minutes at the table — no dates, no prices, just the workshop running. Streamed from our own video library, so it plays properly on a phone.

Film

Chapel Porth, with the Art Club

Three and a half minutes on the sand — setting up, choosing a composition, and the light moving while we work.

Plein air

And the stills from the day

Out of the barn and onto the cliff. The hard part is never the view — it is the light moving while you work, and deciding what to leave out.

Notes from a holiday

France, with Amélie

Artichokes, a forged toasting fork, twenty kilos of seaweed, and a photography festival that turned out to be the best free reference of the summer.

This month’s brief

Adults — a populated beach. Surfers a long way out; a busy afternoon; the RNLI flags. Or paint it from where you were sitting. The word doing the work is populated.

Under-12s — animals. Your own, or one you have watched this summer and liked.

See what’s on at the barn