January 2023
Dear Member With our very Best Wishes for Christmas and the New Year
Your membership renewal is due on 1st January, 2023. We do hope that you will decide to remain a member of Cookham Arts Club. To renew, simply send your fee by bank transfer to our HSBC account (payee: Cookham Arts Club, sort code 40-42-09, a/c number 41157671) with your name as reference. Fees are £20 for single membership and £34 for a couple at the same address.
If you can do this as soon as possible it will be very helpful. We are not asking members to submit a renewal form this year so if any of your details have changed, please do remember to let us know. If you wish to pay by cheque, let me know and I will make sure you are sent the necessary details.
To all our members
As you may have heard, we hope to get a new logo to replace the one which you see at the top of this newsletter. The references to theatre and music are no longer relevant to today’s club. We need a design which will reproduce well in black and white on white or coloured paper, as well as in colour, for example on the website. So do use colour if you like, but make a monochrome version too. If you would like to help, please draw a design on an approximately 10 x 8 inch sheet of white paper and bring it along to one of our meetings soon – OR email a photo of it to me – OR design it ‘on a computer’ and email it to me. We hope to get several suggestions from different sources – Tuesday Painters, other members, people at the party – before we finally decide on the one to adopt – so PLEASE have a go and let us have your design.
Keith Hornblower ran our recent watercolour workshop. Keith was a very good tutor, inspiring the group to produce some really impressive paintings during the day.
Left: Keith at work. Right: one of Keith’s paintings.
-
- Keith at work
-
- Keith Hornblowerpaintings
-
- Keith’s demonstration painting from the workshop
Our AGM was held in November, when we reviewed the Cookham Arts Club year 2022.
Following the formal business of the AGM, our member Brian Oswald gave a fascinating talk entitled ‘Discovering Contemporary Art – a Personal Journey’. Brian has travelled extensively with his work as a priest, particularly to West Africa and India. He introduced us to the work of some very interesting artists; Engelbert Mveng who was a Cameroonian Jesuit priest, artist and theologian, whose scholarly ideas found aesthetic expression in his numerous paintings; Maqbool Fida Husain who was an Indian artist known for executing bold, vibrantly coloured narrative paintings in a modified cubist style; Paula Rego, a Portuguese-British visual artist known particularly for her paintings and prints based on storybooks. You can find extensive details of these artists with a bit of research on the internet.
(Brian is a priest in the Catholic Church, Cookham Rise and has his paintings displayed there).
Tuesday painters have now set up a display of paintings in Elizabeth House, Cookham Rise. Please do mention it to friends and family and drop in to view the exhibits and perhaps even make a purchase – Christmas is coming!
Opening Times: Now until – 1st March 2023
Monday – Thursday: 10am – 4pm (12 noon – 2pm closed for lunch)
Friday: 10am – 3pm (12 noon – 2pm closed for lunch)
Events in January
Monthly Meeting, January 19th 2 – 4pm in Parish Centre. A critique of our paintings by Mick McNicholas. Mick has worked as an Art Director and Illustrator in marketing and advertising for much of his professional career. Currently he is focused almost exclusively on figurative painting and portraiture.
Do come along to this critique, and bring one of your paintings (which we haven’t seen before!) for Mick to see and comment upon. Sometimes it makes for a more interesting critique if you bring a painting which you have questions about, perhaps even an unfinished work.
We will vote for our favourite painting after the critique, for which there will be a small prize – as well as our usual
raffle prize.
Tuesday Painting Workshops. At Cookham Dean Village Hall, Church Road, Cookham Dean,
Berks SL6 9PY, from 2 to 5pm.
| Tuesday Painting: cost £2 A topic, appraisal, tea and cake | Tuesday Extra: cost £1.50 Painting, tea and biscuits |
| January 3rd: Space | January 10th: Paint what you like |
| January 17th: A close-up of cut glass | January 24th: Paint what you like |
| January 31st: A solitary tree in a landscape | February 7th: Paint what you like |
Would you like to help in the running of Cookham Arts Club?
Do you have skills in website design and maintenance? We should like to have a computer literate person who is willing to learn about and help maintain our club’s website.
We also need help to organise our Outdoor Painting trips, as our present organiser is unable to continue in this role.
If you think that you would like to help in one of these roles, please get in touch with me or another member of the CAC committee.
Coming Soon
Club Workshop Day: Saturday Feb 18th in the Parish Centre. 10am – 4pm. Wild Cookham is the theme. We will use, for example, photos, other media and paintings as inspiration to produce a piece of artwork which has a narrative around our changing earth. Leysa Henderson of ‘Wild Cookham’ ( www.wildcookham.org.uk ) will be our tutor for the day. Much more details will be in the February newsletter. Paintings will eventually be displayed, and offered for sale, at the ‘Our Changing Earth Festival’ at the Odney Club in June.
TIP OF THE MONTH
Greens can be tricky! Take raw umber or burnt umber, ultramarine and sap green. Mix those three together and add phthalo green or process cyan into the mix to get a great variety of greens.
Dates for your Diary
Our spring exhibition and screen sale is on March 3rd – 5th in Pinder Hall. More details soon.
We plan to take down the paintings displayed in Elizabeth House on 2nd March so that they will be available for you to display in our Spring Exhibition. We hope to replace them with work from the Wild Cookham workshop – before that work is displayed for the Our Changing Earth Festival.
Yours sincerely
Robert Jones
Newsletter Editor