Artist information
I have been painting watercolour pictures for many, many years in an art class at Launton with David Meeks as our tutor. But before using watercolour as a medium, I starting an evening art class in Kidlington after work, just because I had enjoyed the art classes at school and thought I might give it a go! I learnt to use oil paints and enjoyed this medium as I was able to mix the colours on the canvas as well as in my paint pallet and if I didn’t like what I had done it was easy to remove that particular bit! The only downside to using oils is that they do take a long time to ‘dry’ and preparing the canvases before starting to painting.
The reason why I wanted to use watercolour rather than oil was due to one of my managers at work – David Koslow, he was my manager when I worked as a Laboratory technician in the 70’s. He did some fabulous watercolour paintings, mainly of the Oxford University colleges but also other things e.g. steam trains, landscapes, etc. When I got married he allowed me to choose 2 of his paintings as a gift from him. One of Mansfield College and the other of a magnificent steam train. I still have the Mansfield college painting but not the steam train. I am not sure whether David Koslow is alive today?
About 15 years ago, I started watercolour classes in Launton with David Meeks, local artist and tutor. To begin with it was a small group of people mainly from Launton but today we have a lovely group of people from all parts of Bicestershire. David is our tutor and shows us various techniques each week to help us with our paintings as well as helping when we get stuck on one bit of our painting. Many times during my huge learning curve, he would frighten me by taking my painting and putting it under a running tap to remove what I had done so I could start again! After, there was usually a very good outcome for that particular painting!
I think my best work using watercolour are usually seascapes, landscapes and trees but I have done a head study of a couple of my cairn terriers as well as life studies, fruits and flowers.
I think I still have a lot to learn and experiment with watercolour and hope I will be doing this in 2025 so there will be more paintings people can chose from!