La Rochelle art weekend

This last weekend I packed up my art supplies in a friend's land rover and headed to the Eastern Border Highlands region of Zim for the La Rochelle artists' retreat. It felt like packing for an expedition as I had my tubes of paint, sticks of charcoal, various types of paper and canvas and an array of paint brushes. It was my first time at La Rochelle and it was interesting to visit Penhalonga as it is where my great grandmother came from and where my Greek great grandfather came during the gold rush there.

Cherie Marais' sketch of La Rochelle

Gardens at La Rochelle

We arrived at La Rochelle and the others had already started, so we quickly put our luggage in our rooms and then headed for the botanical gardens in the dell. This required loading up a car as we were a little weighed down with art supplies. We found the others in amongst the aloes and were told to walk around using a view finder and take it all in. We then did some blind contour drawing to get our left side of the brain working. After lunch we made a mini composition with things we had found and used wax resist and water colour with a bit of ink. Sheena Chadwick and Sarah Fynn, the two professional artists running the weekend, were very encouraging throughout and never passed negative comments - I don't know how they did it. On Saturday we played with light and charcoal and then did a two tone study using burnt sienna and ultramarine blue as the only colours on our palette. We were then set the challenge for Sunday of doing a landscape on a square piece of paper that captured the open spaces and slopes of La Rochelle and had a human element somewhere e.g. a path, bench or person. We could if we wanted be influenced by the work of Webster Mubayirenyi. Quite a daunting challenge.

Work by Webster Mubayirenyi

We were given a history of La Rochelle whilst we were there. The Courtaulds who built it were of French Huguenot descent and were wealthy from the family fabric manufacturing business. Lady Courtauld was by all accounts a real character, supposedly having a tattoo up her leg which was scandalous for the 1950's. The hotel was full of artefacts and had the original sliding door glass panes framed as they used to have their guests sign them. One of the signatures is that of Herbert Chitepo. The house is full of orchids from the orchid house and there is apparently one orchid that was given to Lady Courtauld from Singapore and was very rare. It had died back but an orchid specialist from Mutare had managed to get it to grow back from the root. When the specialist was dying the orchid bloomed for the first time in many years and the staff and La Rochelle sent the orchid to be placed by his hospital bed and he saw it the day before he died.

Lady Courtauld's portrait at La Rochelle