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Green Pebble Magazine
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Bungay Road
Beccles NR34 8HE
Articles> Helen Gilbart
Helen is running two short, 3-day drawing courses for beginners and improvers in Walberswick on July 2nd - 4th and September 17th - 19th. For more information about Helen and the classes, please refer to the information at the bottom of this page.
Imagine the vastness of the beginning of life on the planet: the time scale, the shifting continents, the broiling landscape that eventually settled down to produce, almost miraculously, the earliest single-cell organisms. Then, slowly, over billions of years the single cell evolved into the myriad complex creatures we know today.
How does an artist begin to explore this and how do they capture what is that most elusive of kernels: life?
For Suffolk painter and sculptor Helen Gilbart, the journey to do just that began in earnest in the magnificent corridors of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. Invited there as their Artist in Residence in 2001, what started out as a one-year collaborative project to build on Helen’s existing interest in fossils and the earth, grew to span five years.
‘It was wonderful,’ she says in her Suffolk home near Yoxford, turning her chair around so that she can look out the studio window onto expansive fields. ‘Charles Darwin was very much on the map last year, of course, but I’ve been studying evolution all this time.’
She didn’t mean to fall into a science environment, she hastens to add, and as an artist it took quite some time for her to find a way of working with evolutionary science, ‘although my joint first degree in Geography as well as Fine Art was a life line’. The university department quickly cast its spell. ‘I would go in there where the students were identifying things, and I would be in the midst of all this science on evolution, and it was fantastic for me. There were outstanding and renowned fossil collections in the department’s Sedgwick Museum, some of which had come from Darwin himself. The museum very much became the pivotal point for my work.’
This still left her with the challenge of absorbing the span of 3.7 billion years of evolution and somehow using part – or all – of it as a springboard for the development of an extensive, and still on-going, body of work...
This is only a small part of the article.
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3-Day Drawing Courses 2010
Want to draw, but never have?
Drawn a little and want to get back into it?
Thinking about further art courses and need to develop a portfolio?
Then come on a short drawing course to help build confidence to see and draw better.
*Geared to individual need.
*Particularly welcome beginners, improvers and those developing a portfolio.
*Explore different art materials, techniques and artworks.
The workshops take place on the Suffolk coast in the lovely village of Walberswick .
Helen Gilbart, who conducts these workshops, is a professional artist with many years experience in drawing and teaching. She has won several significant fine art awards to practice internationally.
Choose from Short Courses 2010
17th, Sat. 18th & Sun. 19th September.
Daily 10 – 4.
Each three-day workshop: £105. (Single daily rate of £38 offered later if places are available).
Early booking is essential as places are limited.
For further information contact Helen Gilbart : 01728 648 326
Helen Gilbart's Email
Helen Gilbart's website
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