Drawing Plants - The Botanical Works of Jim Dine
​
​5 Week Course

Tuesdays 9.30am - 3pm
20th, 27th Feb, 5th, 12th, 19th March 2024


Tutor - Robin Wu
​£380

 This 5 Week Course will be a mixed media exploration of the garden and all the natural forms that inhabit it.


The North American artist Jim Dine (1935 - ) is well known for his association with the Pop Art movement of the 1960s and his other works that evolved from that through to the present day. However alongside these he has also been making botanical drawings for over 50 years. These stunning works have evolved in parallel with his central practice and it is his particular working processes, methods and materials for these that will be guiding us on this short course.  


Dine’s botanical works are complex mixed media pieces - often incorporating both monochrome and colour materials such as charcoal, acrylic paint, watercolour, pastel and collage within one work to depict plants in different stages of their life cycle. Part of their beauty undoubtedly lies in their free and creative use of materials. We will be taking on this playful and experimental mixed media approach throughout the course and looking at how materials themselves can often fire and lead the creative process. The other facet we will consider is the careful tightrope Dine walks between a wilder and more expressive sensibility and very careful, rigorous observation and rendering of the subject matter - so essential when it comes to natural forms. 


We will engage visually with all of these ideas as we draw, print and paint from plant forms in the studio in all stages of life and decay. We will build towards making a series of large mixed media works.