CHETTLE SUMMER SCHOOL 2026 - 'Landscape: Simplifying shapes, playing with colour'

Chettle Summer School 2026 – ‘Landscape: Simplifying shapes, playing with colour’

Sunday, Monday & Tuesday 12^th, 13^th & 14^th July 2026

On my laptop, we’ll look at some examples of landscape painting and ask ourselves ‘how have these paintings conformed to our motto this summer ‘Simplifying shapes, playing with colour’?

Weather permitting, I shall send you out sketching the local landscape – it can include ponds, houses, barns, buildings, tractors, fences, fields, trees, bushes, shrubs, tracks and roads etc., but in all cases, you’ll start with simple line drawings which outline the main shapes. For instance, if you’re drawing a shrub, you’re not looking for the detail of the shrub, you’re looking for the overall shape of the shrub and its place within your composition.

Here are two lovely examples of Dorset paintings. In both pictures you can see shapes simplified but still, each in their own way, they capture the elements of the landscape that the artist was looking for. Note in the right hand picture that the artist has created patterns (swirls, circles and stripes) within the main landscape shapes, whereas in the left hand picture the artist (Roger Fry) has found textures and tone within the shapes but very much simplified those shapes into recognisable contained shapes. With all these individual shapes put together in one painting, the artists show depth and distance – ask yourself how they do that? Look also at Roger Fry’s clouds and how he formalises them into shapes very similar to those in his landscape.

I’m going to send you out once you’ve made a viewfinder. Through that viewfinder you’re going to find a composition. Finding a composition can entail much less worry than you might think! Both these landscape paintings above have their horizons at about one third of the way down the painting from the top. You’ll mark your viewfinder with one third divisions and put your horizon one third of the way down from the top. Once you’ve done that, you’ll look to see what you have falling into view beneath that horizon.

Make three or four sketches of different views, simplifying the shapes as if they were surrounded by a ‘skin’. That ‘skin’ is the shape you’ll draw. As ever, look for the in-between spaces, how the shapes relate to each other, how big and what shape are the gaps between the main elements? (You are welcome to work indoors  from landscape photographs if you prefer).

One of these sketches will be the one you take further – you can come back to the hall and question me about them and which to choose. You’ll make a bigger drawing of the chosen view and in it you’ll look for textures, patterns, tones, and perhaps even make some colour notes within your simplified shapes.