Artworks from Ithaca Painting Holidays

Artworks from Ithaca Painting Holidays showcases paintings by Alan Dedman and Adriana Eyzaguirre and by people who attend our courses. Both Alan and Adriana have had an academic training in fine art painting, which is rare these days but essential to the business of teaching others how to acquire such skills. Alan Dedman is a qualified, experienced educator.

Above you can see the phantasmagorical aspect of Adriana’s work. How she weaves different viewpoints together so we get an overall impression of time, place and character. At the same time it is a portrait of a man and his dog.

Alan and Adriana are competent figurative artists who know how to apply paint in a meaningful way, to elicit visual poetry from their subject matter. Artworks from Ithaca Painting Holidays shows how two similar but very different people go about making artworks based on landscape subject matter.

The large (8ft x 4ft) painting by Alan Dedman of the Cumberland Basin in Bristol, (supra) exemplifies will-power and drawing skills at work in the English landscape. Alan made this painting at the scene, ‘en plein air’.

Goats and Sheep by Adriana is an example of the way this Ithaca based artist celebrates natural subject matter on the island of Ithaca.

Goats and sheep are amusing, able climbers. Adriana captures their motif alongside natural scenery and foliage.

This watercolour of Portinaxt (Ibiza) by Alan Dedman, demonstrates the artists versatility and capacity to cope with varying mediums. It is an academic painting, showing how watercolour can be used to celebrate visual phenomena in a sunny, Mediterranean setting.

Adriana’s ‘Island Landscape’ (supra) is a creative fusion of subject matter, gently illustrating the Homeric fable about Oddysseus’ return. The empty chair awaits, set on a crimson carpet. In the middle distance we see what might be Vathi; beyond that, Ionian sea and islands.

Artworks for Ithaca Painting Holidays includes work done in the UK. ‘The Bendy Tree’ was painted, in situ, en plein air, by Alan Dedman. It shows sunrise at the West Coast, Victorian resort of Clevedon in North Somerset, embodying the symbolic Yew tree which has succumbed to the Krumholz effect.

Alan Dedman painted the subject over a succession of days between the hours of 5am and 7am – before going to work elsewhere. The light effects are crucial to the feel of the painting.