High Country Deep Time Drawing and Painting Workshops

Spring workshops

We have four dates for workshops in the second half of 2023.

These workshops coincide with distinct seasons on the Granite Belt high country. Late winter sees the bush coming alive with native flowerings the air adrift with low scudding clouds under fresh winds. Late spring throws birds into the trees and a second stage of flowering in the bush. The air is crystal clear and the bush is full of sounds.

The first late winter offerings are on the weekend of the 26th – 27th of August and on the weekend of the 2nd – 3rd of September. The second Spring workshops are on the weekend of 28th – 29th of October and on the weekend of the 4th – 5th of November

On day one we will visually study and get to know a particular patch of natural landscape, on day two we will view this landscape with a model providing a human angle into the natural scene.

Workshops will comprise four three hour sessions beginning Saturday morning 8.30 am till Sunday 3pm. Artists should bring drawing and quick drying painting materials, choice of paper and brushes, water container and stool. The session sites are easily accessible within reach of amenities.

The workshops are held on our property 12kms West of Stanthorpe. Accommodation is not included in the workshop provision, there are plenty of choices for accommodation within easy reach, the closest areas to the workshop are Amiens, Broadwater, Greenlands, Glen Aplin, Stanthorpe.

If you are interested in booking a place please email Barbara at Barbarapenrose3@gmail.com. We are limited to 8 participants per workshop.

For further information regarding background and workshop payment please consult the pages on this site. We look forward to meeting you.

Workshop reflections

Our 2022 Workshops concluded on the weekend. While the natural environment of the granite highlands in itself draws participants we decided to continue an experiment begun in a previous workshop series, by adding a human element to the subject.

On each of the recent weekends we provided models, a different one for each day. A discussion in the morning ascribed a character to the model while the particular landscape setting provided an individual scenario for the drawing session.

We’re interested in bridging a cultural and natural divide and developing stories of people in nature, stories, initially that have their origins in histories that haven’t been overrun by mythological constructs.

The Human element is intended to absorb the artist into the scene and to draw out stylistic choices based on cultural associations not stereotypically paired with scenic painting and drawing.

The results are encouraging, with artists finding resources both from within their repertoire of methods and from cultural experiences to apply in creating inventive pictorial works.

We will be publishing the 2023 workshop schedule early in the new year. All the best and thanks to all participants in helping to create memorable and meaningful events.

Figure – Ground Revised

In developing the theme of our current workshops we ask – what is it that deepens a connection to landscape? Past events delivering their experience to the present can enable us to project a relational environment into the landscape.

We start from the idea that there are multiple histories embedded in the country. Visual culture carries threads of stories by style and mode of storytelling – the figure in the landscape can be a conduit for connecting threads flowing through time and space.

Specifically in the coming weekends we plan to have a different model on each day. we’ll present a storyline context for the day which will be divided into two sessions, each with a different angle into the day’s story.

Practical information for the weekend:

Materials – please bring a manageable array of your usual dry and wet materials for drawing and painting. Paper in book form or sheets A4 to A3. Bear in mind we will be walking into the landscape 100 metres or less for the practical sessions so fit it into a carrying bag. A low folding stool would be useful as ants are a significant civilization in this country.

You’ll be entering the bush so you will need protective clothing hat and boots. Please consult weather forecast to decide on necessary clothing. If the weather is really difficult we will be able to use the new studios which are situated in a natural environment with large windows into rock and forest views.

We ask everyone to come to the property at 8 – 8.30 am in order to organize for a 9 am start in the bush situation. Sessions will run from 9am to 12pm and 1pm to 4pm.

We will supply lunch so please let us know by email of your dietary needs if necessary. Bring a flask with you for hot drinks, we can supply tea and coffee with lactose-free milk.

Workshops 2022

We are ready to announce dates for our next drawing and painting workshops beginning late November. We had expected our studio building project to have been complete at the end of this month, it was delayed and its completion is not expected till late October. Given that tranquility and absorption in the landscape are a central component to the workshops the energies associated with building construction don’t fit the brief.

We are offering three weekends for workshops each with a maximum of 7 people on the following dates:

19th – 20th November

26th – 27th November

10th – 11th December

These workshops comprise a programme of drawing and painting the Human Figure in the landscape. The property contains dramatic stone hillsides, boulder formations and forested opportunities for developing tableaux with a human narrative to be introduced on each occasion.

We are currently unable to provide accommodation for workshop participants, please click here for further information on local accommodation.

To book your place in a workshop please email barbarapenrose3@gmail.com and for any further information not contained on the website.

MUSE July2020

The winter sun is warming the stone hillsides at Haneena Hill, with light darting through the stringy bark forests. We’ve got a good load of firewood and the house is well warmed by the fireplace.

By popular request we’ve pencilled in 2 weekends in July : 10th – 12th and 24th – 26th, one or both sets of dates could go ahead depending on the show of interest, several artists have so far booked in for the first one.

This workshop is themed with a human narrative, we’ll draw and paint the figure in a landscape both internal and external. A figure immersed in a narrative in a physical terrain. Ever since we were introduced to the landscape at Haneena Hill we’ve understood a human past both real and imagined with reminders of human activity occasionally found in the relic of a stone dam, or a ring-barked monolith. For this workshop we’re imagining a particular emotional scenario developing a narrative of life in the bush combining the unseen past with the visible landscape towards an imaginative outcome.

On day one of the workshop we’ll draw from the model in the landscape. Day two will be an immersive development of the content, detail and style of the drawings.

Please check pages for further information and contact booking

August workshop

Our next workshop is on the 9th to the 11th of August, we’ve got in a load of wood to keep the home fires burning and we’ll have some great warming winter food. The sun is getting higher and we’ll expect the spring breezes to thrill the experience of the escarpments and being in the bush. For workshop details check the information pages on this site and contact us if you’d like to reserve a place.

Participants in the last workshop in June did some exciting work, and weathered challenges walking the terrain in the process of immersing themselves in the landscape.

They refreshed their visual language with some strong drawing.

Stared down the challenges of depicting winter forest light.

and catching the atmospherics of granite boulder volumes.

A field all foreground and equally all background

Our June workshop is fast approaching, with the clear winter air at this time of the year we’re using it as an opportunity to remember Les Murray, a poet piercing the depth of a rural experience in country far to the south of Stanthorpe.

This is a painting and drawing workshop, participants are encouraged to bring materials of their choice, we will also provide a selection specific to the weekend’s aims. The Haneena Hill homestead provides a warm and comfortable board and accommodation over the weekend.

This quote from Murray’s poem Equanimity sets the theme for the June workshop:

Fire-prone place-names apart

there is only love; there are no Arcadias.

Whatever its variants of meat-cuisine, worship, divorce,

human order has at heart

an equanimity. Quite different from inertia, it’s a place

where the churchman’s not defensive, the indignant aren’t on the qui vive,

the loser has lost interest, the accountant is truant to remorse,

where the farmer has done enough struggling-to-survive

for one day, and the artist rests from theory—

where all are, in short, off the high comparative horse

of their identity.

Almost beneath notice, as attainable as gravity, it is

a continuous recovering moment.

Please checkout reference pages on the website for information regarding workshop schedule and what to bring.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Leaves of grass, grains of sand.

Our next workshop is over the Easter weekend, a time symbolic of rejuvenation, of adjusting one’s perception to the minutiae. The rocks and the forest shelter tiny worlds enabled by orientation and position in relation to prevailing wind, rain and sunshine.

In this workshop we’ll focus on the small scale discoveries to be made at Haneena Hill: Rock holes eroded by the elements in which richly varied landscapes unfold within a space the size of a human hand, lichen nestling among tree roots presenting in a tiny scale the forms of the high forest foliage.

The Autumn air on the granite high country thrills the senses enabling a profound sense of time and place.

For workshop Itinerary information look here.

Further enquiries and to book your place in this workshop here.

Reflections on the Summer Cool Workshop

The artists who participated in the Summer Cool workshop brought a considerable skill base and quality of aesthetic decisions to bear in the presence of the natural environment of Haneena Hill.

Necessarily these encounters are improvisations as the sites are complex interactive ecologies. we arrive at a forest textured with stringy bark, the geometry of cypress and scribbled lines of angophra, interlace with large fallen timber glowing surfaces of red and yellow fungus.

A stone ledge or entire granite hillside, a group of ancient lichen covered boulders giving pause to reflect on the formative geological processes in deep time, their volumes misted by acacia and melaleuca foliage.

Each workshop here has a freshness in the encounter between the complex natural landscape and the artist whose own complexities are encouraged into the spaces between two natures.

The outdoor art making and interior living, meals and conversation combine for a successful weekend.

Find out more:

Workshops dates in 2019
Reviews by participating artists
Sample Itinerary

January 4th – 6th Painting Workshop: Temperature

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Nameer is back from Africa with a drawing process developed in his travels through Tanzania’s Usambara mountains, the Serengetti Plains, Lake Tanganyika and Zanzibar. In the last month he was immersed in a social drawing project in Lagos, Nigeria. The sweltering equatorial climate drew him to certain ways of addressing subject matter in his drawing – tonal and textural choices in the patterning of surface and development of spatial structure.

Now for this summer workshop we take temperature as a serious consideration in developing the means of painting, cool to warm colour choices, the scale and texture of surface pattern and how they serve to develop a physical climate within the painting.

Barbara is developing a menu for the weekend that reflects the theme of temperature and climate, her provisions are a major part of the weekend experience.

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There are limited places available for this workshop, please use the contact page to show your interest in joining us for this first workshop of 2019.

ITINERARY

Friday

Arrive late afternoon / early evening – Dinner and get to know each other.

Introduction to the place and the ideas to be developed over the weekend.

Saturday

7.30 – 8.30 Breakfast

9.30 – 12.30 Tutored workshop in the environment with Nameer.

1 – 2 Lunch

2 – 4 Independent practices in the environment and one-on-one consultations with Nameer

Free time

6.30 pre dinner refreshments

7.00 dinner

Image Presentation

Sunday

7.30 – 8.30 Breakfast

9.30 – 12.30 Tutored workshop in the environment with Nameer

1 – 2 Lunch

2.30 – departure

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Cost per person for the workshop is $390. Enquire/book your place here
Workshop numbers are limited to six people. For future workshop dates and themes please subscribe to this website for workshop updates.

Cost per person for the workshop is $390. Enquire/book your place here
Workshop numbers are limited to six people. For future workshop dates and themes please subscribe to this website for further notice.
Accomodation is in a spacious heritage residence with wood heater and dormitory style sleeping arrangements.
Each person will need to bring their own sheet and doona/blanket/ pillow and towel
Meals and refeshments provided, notify of special dietary requirements
The tutored sessions will require some walking on easy to medium grade bush trails and rocks
Stanthorpe is a sub-alpine highland so you’ll need to bring warm clothes, gloves, coat and sealed boots
Art materials – Bring your usual range of drawing and painting media, some materials will be provided

We limit the weekend to a group of six, please register your interest via the contact page in the dropdown menu.