5869 Educators providing Courses

Coombe Farm Studios

coombe farm studios

Devon

Coombe is a small-scale rural centre, dedicated to growing creativity. It’s a place where you can develop new skills, supported by a beautiful environment, great food & people who actively enable the creative process. It’s also a place to make and show work, connect with nature and get inspired. We opened in 1983, it was one of the first small artist-led centres offering week-long creative courses. Since then, over the past 35 years, we are lucky to have developed an amazing network of people from all over the world. Our core activity is a mix of tutored art retreats that run year-round, bespoke projects for the creative community and showcasing new work on and off site. We celebrate difference, enjoy the messy ways of the creative process, celebrating the tricky bits, sharing in the successes and frustrations, encouraging others to explore and share the process of making. We are interested in cultivating wisdom, courage and wonder, and we believe in action. We collaborate and look for synergies with others, to ensure that we, as well as the people we work with, aren’t burnt out, bored, disillusioned or skint, but rather nourished, inspired, committed, passionate, and working within resource limits. Our small-scale allows us to be attentive to the simple things we believe make a great place to create, learn and research – skills-based tuition from passionate professions, a relaxed atmosphere, a beautiful environment, delicious food and great company.

Paint with Ray

paint with ray

London

Welcome, this my story of how I came to be a Bob Ross instructor. I loved art when I was at school but never found the opportunity to develop this interest. A long career in farming nurtured my love of the countryside and I took enormous pleasure in observing nature; early mornings, sunrises and mists, majestic trees, sparkling sunshine on the water etc. Later in life, as fate would have it, I found myself laid up for 6 weeks after an operation, and with so much time on my hands, I needed an activity – in an attempt to keep me occupied my wife gave me a painting by numbers kit. After that first very basic kit, I had begun to rediscover my love of painting. I rapidly moved on to acrylics then watercolours and then one day I came across Bob Ross on the television and was fascinated by his ‘Wet-on-Wet’ technique of painting with oils. I was amazed at the incredibly professional and delightful paintings which were possible to create in just one sitting and I watched his programmes over and over again. By 2011 I had attended Bob Ross instructor workshops to learn this method of painting for myself. Passionate about sharing this wonderful way of painting with others and discovering I had a natural aptitude for teaching, in 2012 I qualified as a Bob Ross instructor for ‘Wet-on-Wet’ floral techniques and in 2013 returned and qualified in landscape painting. My classes in my studio in Great Glen, Leicestershire, are friendly and relaxed and above all informal. We have fun together, make new friends, gain confidence through learning a new skill and anybody, even someone who has never picked up a brush before can produce a fabulous piece of art over the course of the day to take home and enjoy – a painting to be proud of. I guarantee you’ll have a thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Adam Aaronson Glass Studio

adam aaronson glass studio

West Horsley

Adam specialises in free blown glass. His vessels and sculptures are at once a celebration of the simplicity of pure form, and also an investigation into layering. His coloured patinas draw on painterly techniques and are predominately inspired by a love of nature, especially the play of light on water and the landscape. He is a consummate colourist, and the Impressionist painters -Turner, Whistler, Monet and others – have been a significant inspiration for his work. “I think of my work as a story of surface and form. Each blown glass artwork is a canvas, depicting landscape in a variety of abstracted ways; a shimmering moment of reflection, capturing river and sea, coastline, forest and desert, as light passes over and through. Glass contains its own dynamic of reflection and refraction, and balancing the relationship between form and surface is often challenging. I explore the organic form of each sculpture, celebrating the natural flow and force of molten glass, sometimes leaving behind traditional requirements for functionality. “Sometimes I start with a defined idea, but the intuitive way in which I work means that on occasions I’ll notice unexpected aspects of the developing form and how they relate to the palette I am using. It’s almost as if the evolving piece influences the way it turns out. People often say that glass has a life of its own and it is only when you actually make glass that you understand what this means. I’ve been developing a vocabulary of forms for some years, and these range from the early simple canvases to the more recent organic surfaces.” Adam’s work has been exhibited all over the world and can be found in numerous private collections from royalty to rock stars. Over the years, he has been commissioned to make work for the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Italy’s venerable Salviati glass studio, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the UK’s National Art Collections Fund and The British Museum, among others. Adam’s work has been shown at the prestigious Sotheby’s Contemporary Decorative Arts exhibition in London, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York City. Adam is a Fellow of the Society of Designer Craftsmen (FSDC) and chair of their Selection Committee. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and Adam is also a member of many glass related societies and organisations, including the Contemporary Glass Society, and The Glass Society, which was formed from the merger of the Glass Association and the Glass Circle. Adam is also an active member of the Surrey Sculpture Society and the Surrey Guild of Craftsmen, as well as the Oxford Sculptors Group. Adam has exhibited and demonstrated at Art in Action, the annual arts and crafts event at Waterperry Gardens in Oxfordshire.