Every painting generally starts with a series of wet into damp washes. But how to get these right? In this workshop, award-winning, self taught botanical artist Jarnie Godwin will take you through her own techniques to master these first washes. From broad brush and getting the amount of water right, to blending and finishing, Jarnie will demonstrate the techniques you need to help you gain more confidence with watercolour.

Workshop fee is $50.00

Click here to register

Come see the New England Wildflowers Exhibition and visit with fellow NESBA members.

Carrie Roy is Curator of Art and Research Scholar at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in Pittsburgh, PA.

She is planning to give a presentation that focuses on the History of Botanical Art which will allow her to include a large range of items from the Hunt collection, as well as items from the Library collection. This will give us access to a much larger group of items than we would ever see in person. She will be sure to including a few Dowden pieces when she gets to the more contemporary section, and will also include a very brief introduction to the Institute as well.

Beverly Duncan will speak on her SEEDS sketchbooks which record the life cycles of native trees and shrubs of New England. Individually, each book features the story of the flower to seed to sprouting to growth habits of one plant. Nineteen SEEDS sketchbooks have been acquired by The Mortimer Rare Books Collection at Smith College.

Accomplished artist Bobbi Angell will present a talk entitled “Darwin and the Art of Botany”

Betsy will present “From the Ground Up”, paintings created by observing and illustrating plants in their natural habitats. Whether the habitat was deep in the woods, in a meadow or just along the side of the road, each location presented a special challenge in creating these compositions.

Mark your calendar for the NESBA member meeting! Learn about plans for the upcoming year and opportunities to get involved in NESBA programming. More details and a Zoom link will be published in an upcoming newsletter. Hope to see you there!

Artist reception for NESBA exhibition Grow, Forage, Eat at New England Botanic Gardens at Tower Hill. Mix and mingle with fellow NESBA members as we view the new exhibit and enjoy the gardens at Tower Hill

The masterclass with John Pastoriza-Piñol is SOLD OUT, but we have added a Meet and Greet event for any NESBA who would like to meet John in person and hear his top tips for botanical artists.

The event will take place at the Sherborn Community Center, 3 Sanger Street, Sherborn, MA 01770. Refreshments will be served.

Click here to learn more and register!

British watercolorist Jarnie Godwin returns with an informative presentation on the stages and painting process for seasonal flowers. (jarniegodwinart.com)

This month we welcome Jill Nooney Co-Founder of Bedrock Garden to speak about  “Bedrock Gardens, A Journey from a Personal Oasis to a Community Refuge”

Amanda Cobbett is an award winning UK textile artist. She will talk about her embroidered”paintings”, what influences her art, and the process of foraging for and creating her thread masterpieces. (amandacobbett.com)

Join Sarah Roche and Tara Connaughton for this special Holiday Workshop edition of Beyond the Brush. Have your paints and brushes ready as you are guided through botanically inspired gift tags and mini cards that you can share this season.

As botanical artists, we often look for inspiration in nature and elsewhere. Denise Walser-Kolar, an accomplished ASBA and NESBA member, will talk about finding inspiration from the work of Joris Hoefnagel, an artist who lived 500 years ago. Her journey began many years ago with the discovery of a small book, Nature Illustrated, illustrated with paintings by Hoefnagel. She returned to this book early in her botanical art career.

Taking inspiration from his work, she created a painting from items in her own collection of tiny natural treasures—plants, seashells, insects, etc. This painting became Hoefnagel-Inspired # 1. It was followed by several paintings and the collection grew to become her Hoefnagel-Inspired Series which now numbers 34 and continues on. Every subject in these paintings is very personal to Denise being either from her garden, found on a trip, or given to her by someone special. For more information on Denise’s inspiration and her journey go to the Getty Blog and to Denise's website

Join us for an introduction to the world of color!

How blue can it get? How deep can it be? Some years ago, at the Guggenheim Bilbao, I thought I’d hit on the ultimate blue, displayed on the gallery floor. Yves Klein, who died at thirty-four, was obsessed with purging color of any external associations. Gestural abstraction, he felt, was clotted with sentimental extraneousness. But, in search of chromatic purity, Klein realized that even the purest pigments’ intensity dulled when combined with a binder such as oil, egg, or acrylic. In 1960, he commissioned a synthetic binder that would resist the absorption of light waves, delivering maximum reflectiveness. Until that day in Bilbao, I’d thought Klein a bit of a monomaniacal bore, but Klein International Blue, as he named the pigment—rolled out flat or pimpled, with saturated sponges embedded in the paint surface—turned my eyeballs inside out, rods and cones jiving with joy. This is it, I thought. It can’t get any bluer.

MANY ARTISTS AND MANY OF OUR OUR MEMBERS USE INSTAGRAM TO SHARE THEIR WORK!

First step is how to use Instagram! Then who to follow! All these things will be demonstrated and some of our members will be showing us their work!

Beyond the brush session with Lara Call GastingerLARA CALL GASTINGER

Lara will join us and work through the various techniques for painting roots. You can view some of Lara's work on her website and Instagram.