All Saints Youth Project - Card Making Workshop
We recently led a workshop with young people at All Saints Youth Project in preparation for our Artists Open House event on 9th and 10th November 2024. We wanted to involve the young people in the event and they were very keen to collaborate with us. All Saints Youth Project has been providing recreational and informal educational opportunities for young people aged 11 to 19 years old (up to 25 for those with disabilities) for over 25 years. The project supports young people and adults, including those with additional needs, and their families. The workshop was undertaken by a group who really enjoyed the opportunity to try out a number of different techniques, making a series of vibrant, unique handmade cards. These will be for sale at the Open House event and we are looking forward to hosting the young people. Half of the funds raised from the sale of artworks and 100% of the proceeds from sales of cards will be given to the project in November.
Gillian Lever
MAKING SPACE
A Creative Quiet Day inspired by Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture and drawing
Friday 12th July OR Saturday 13th July 2024 from 10.00am–4.30pm
Life can be hectic and often overwhelming. Becky Morse-Brown (Art Therapist) and I are currently enjoying planning a gentle, reflective day of quiet creativity in the newly refurbished and accessible Dupuis Retreat Centre at St. Paul’s Convent in Birmingham for later this Summer. The Retreat Centre, set in extensive gardens with its own chapel and comfortable meeting rooms, will offer soul-nourishing space for art-making, contemplation and prayer.
We will be looking together at the work of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, whose elemental artwork was shaped by the contours of the fields, hills and rock formations of the Yorkshire landscapes in which she grew up. There will be time to reflect with rocks and pebbles, make simple, experimental drawings using some of Hepworth’s techniques, and work freely with clay - all of which, we hope, will help us breathe gently and open up new life-giving spaces within us.
Becky and I have both found that our Christian faith has been nourished and shaped by art making and imagery over the years.
The cost is £75 which also includes all art materials and refreshments. Please bring your own lunch. The address is St. Paul’s Convent, 94 Selly Park Road, Selly Park, Birmingham, B29 7LL.
All are warmly welcome. If you would like to book a place contact Lever Arts.
“Draw alongside the silence of stone
until it’s calmness can claim you.”
John O’Donohue
Gillian Lever
The brilliance of colour
2024 has started joyfully working on a series of new oil canvases in the studio. I have been loving the emerging colours of Spring in the garden and on local walks and have also been enjoying studying Vuillard’s enigmatic use of colour and light. Earlier in the year we visited the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille where I was captivated by his ‘Still Life with a bouquet of roses.’
Winifred Nicholson is another artist who I find truly inspirational in relation to colour - her writing, as well as her painting, is so vibrant.
”Each colour is unique, but no colour can stand alone. To get the full value of its unique colour it must have other hues by its side, not for mere contrast, as black, say, contrasts with white, or square with circle, but prismatically to break up the rays of colour, as a shuttlecock is tossed, to and from the waves of light. Thus all the most brilliant things of nature are composed of tiny facets or mirrors which re-reflect each other - a kingfisher’s breast, jay’s feather, butterfly’s wing, fish’s scales, flower petals in all their transparency - each may appear one hue, but in reality under a microscope are made up of many varied hues in true harmony, heightening each other’s brilliance. So we cull our colours here and there, up and down the scale to create the particular colour we have in mind.”
Winifred Nicholson
Later in 2024 Jake and I are planning an Open Studios event here in Birmingham - a focus for my harmonic experiments.
