One of our tutors, Nneka Uzoigwe, was invited to this year’s Autumn Harvest Festival Show at the Royal Horticultural Society. She had two days to present a live painting demonstration of a wide range of harvest staged by the RHS.
Live painting demo, Nneka Uzoigwe, RHS
In Nneka’s own words:
This autumn we were invited to the RHS Harvest Festival to paint a magnificent still life display. It was created by ‘Pennard plants’ as an interpretation of the painting, ‘Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables’, by Sir Nathaniel Bacon.
Intended as an interactive living artwork, the public was invited to complete the setup by posing as the cookmaid!
In contrast to several months in which Sir Nathanial would have spent first growing and then carefully rendering each vegetable, I had only two days! I decided to set myself a fun challenge to try to paint the majority of the large display instead of just picking a small section. Using a direct approach, I started by quickly covering my canvas with a dark tone and pulled out the lights with tissue to establish the composition and a rough value pattern. I then began blocking in all the shapes of colour, rendering the most detail within the focal points and moving out from them more abstractly.
