Watercolour: Exploring flow and form
- Friday, 10 October 2025
- Saturday, 11 October 2025
Enrol
| Standard: | £360 |
| Concessions: | £324 |
Please book a ticket to attend this course which will take place in the Roden Centre for Creative Learning.
Tickets include entry to the National Gallery. Please arrive in good time to access the building and find the event.
Bookings close 10 minutes before the event begins.
Concessions are for full-time students, jobseekers, and disabled adults.
This event is open for House and Exhibition Members priority booking until Thursday, August 21, 2025.
About
Join artist Jo Lewis for a two-day watercolour painting course, designed to encourage and develop a transition into making abstract watercolour paintings.
Watercolour is a painting material which is very simple in origin yet can expand and extrapolate into a vast array of outcomes. Over the two-day course, we will explore watercolour’s fluidity, luminosity and transparence, its subtlety, and how time and flow play such a role in the making of watercolour works. The course will explore ways we can use this most fluid of mediums as a vehicle to create dynamic and exciting abstract paintings.
During the two days we will experiment with different approaches and techniques, getting to know and celebrating watercolour’s unique characteristics and subtleties whether working small and fast or on larger, more developed pieces. On both days we will briefly spend time in the Gallery as we consider the role of colour, composition and tone to create our work.
Initially taking inspiration from the exhibition ‘Radical Harmony Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists,’, a series of exercises and experiments will lead us to develop different approaches and techniques as we take steps towards abstraction. Whether through layering, washes, fine tuning our palette, experimenting with our brushwork or exploring new materials, the course will encourage and foster a new relationship with this most exciting and versatile of mediums.
All materials are provided, and your works are yours to take home. Handouts with extra resources will be provided in advance of the sessions.
In the first day, we will start by exploring a range of techniques and materials for painting in watercolour, designed to widen our knowledge and inspire our imagination. We will also visit and draw on the ‘Radical Harmony’ exhibition with a particular focus on colour and composition. Back in the studio, we will work on our colour choices and mixing to develop work both small scale and large inspired by our observations in the Gallery and our own ideas.
Throughout the second day, we will begin with exploring more techniques in abstract watercolour, equipping ourselves with as many options as possible as we look to develop our own personal work. We will again briefly make work with water-soluble materials in the Gallery, focussing on atmosphere and mood. Back in the studio, we will spend time planning and preparing a new series of abstract watercolours, making careful decisions about type of paper, colours, paint application and intentions.
Your tutor
Jo Lewis is a London-based artist, who works primarily with ink and watercolour on paper, and her work explores aspects of movement and stasis, and the fragility of the moment of interaction between pigment and paper. Recent series have been based around bodies of water and landscapes in Guangxi, the Rhone river and the river Thames. Jo’s work has been featured in exhibitions in both the UK and internationally. She currently has a solo show ‘Espsace Fluide’ in Lyon and is preparing for her solo show in Paris next Spring. Recent group shows include The Trinity Buoy Wharf 2024 Drawing Prize, Galerie Papiers d’Art, Paris, and SEE Galerie, Paris. She was also invited to present her work at the Drawing Research Network Conference: ‘Temporal Drawing ’1, 2023 and at the Radical Drawing Symposium held by the University of Leeds Beckett in 2024.
Her work has been commissioned and collected by individuals and institutions globally including Hermès, Royal College of Music, 22 Bishopsgate, Commonwealth Bank of Australis, Ashtead Hospital, Paris Baguette, Seoul. and the OWO Raffles Hotel, London.