Drawing in the Wild

A four-week online course with Chris Wallbank

Dates Tuesdays 2+9+16+23 March

Times 10am – 12.30

25 places available

Join Chris Wallbank for this online course using film, including the tutor’s own footage of wildlife, to transport us into the great outdoors.

Drawing can be a means of connecting more closely with the natural world, even when nature is viewed at a distance through digital media. Without leaving home, participants will be introduced to the challenges of drawing nature in the field and develop strategies for capturing a sense of the wildlife subject in its habitat. Drawing will also be used to investigate the spaces we inhabit, as we try to expand our perception of those most familiar landscapes and see new wonder in the nature found on our own doorsteps, outside our windows and around our homes. With diverse artist examples for reference, we will develop inspiration for our own compositions using a range of different drawing media. Each week we will make drawings based on one of these themes; drawing from film, from life, from art and from imagination. Above all, every session will aim to introduce a new experience of connecting with the wild that is achievable from home and will equip participants with a range of approaches to drawing in nature that can also be developed in their own time; perhaps alongside an existing art practice, or simply as a form of recreation, meditation and mindfulness.

The tutor

Chris Wallbank is a painter, drawer and printmaker. His work explores pictorial space and the experience of landscape, more often than not in wild environments where he is most at home working in response to the changing elements and rhythm of nature. His interest in the role visual art can play in presenting themes of ecology in a new light has led him to collaborate with numerous conservation projects. These range from the long-term monitoring of breeding guillemot colonies on Skomer Island to the preservation of urban black kites across the metropolis of New Delhi. For this commitment to art and ecology Chris has been awarded the 2020 Birdscape Galleries’ Conservation through art award. In 2019 he was awarded both the Wales Prize and Visitors Choice Award at Wales Contemporary for his drawings of guillemot colonies. Chris has been an elected professional member of the Society of Wildlife Artist’s (SWLA) since 2015.

Chris’s tutoring experience stems from his training and commitment as a member of faculty at the Royal Drawing School where he teaches on the Young Artist programme. He has developed a wide range of drawing courses with the school and at sites across London including; Whitechapel Gallery, The British Museum, The Garden Museum, Buckingham Palace, the National Gallery and most recently online. Chris has also taught at the International Institute of Fine Art, New Delhi and on the Building Craft course for the Prince’s Foundation as well as numerous workshops specialising in drawing nature in the field, from wild geese at the Danish Wadden Sea to neotropical wildlife in the Peruvian Amazon.

Chris’s work is held in national and international collections and has been exhibited widely, including the Wellcome Collection, Christie’s London, The Sunday Times Watercolour Competition and The Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize. Solo exhibitions include Cheng-Kim Loke Gallery at WWT Slimbridge, RSPB Ynys-hir and a drawing installation exhibited throughout Sheffield Cathedral for Festival of the Mind. Past illustration clients have included Bloomsbury Publishing, S4C television, Strata Florida Heritage Landscape Project, Journal of Landscape Architecture and British Birds.

This workshop is suitable for beginners and is free to attend but we suggest a voluntary donation to support the continuing work of Oriel Davies delivering workshops, events, activities and projects. Our aim is to provide opportunities for all in society to ensure nobody misses out on the health, wellbeing and educational benefits of creativity.