Kenilworth

Our week at Kenilworth passed very quickly for me. Nancy was fairly bored but didn’t complain and ended up doing some voluntary work at the centre where the week long art workshops were being held. We arrived at Kenilworth Saturday midmorning (24th Sept) after a good run from Brisbane. To the best of my knowledge there isn’t a dedicated caravan park in Kenilworth and most travellers seem to stay at the local showground. The procedure is that you just drive in, pick a spot you like and set up camp, late in the day “Clem” comes around takes a few details, like rego and name and you pay your money all of $14.00 per night power and water and if you want to use the showground showers $1.00 for 4 minutes of good hot water. In our case we used our own shower. Being situated only a five minute walk to the village and directly across the road from the school where the art workshops were being conducted, we found the tranquil rural setting of the showground an ideal venue, even just sitting and reading a book was most enjoyable and relaxing. “Kenilworth Celebrates Arts Festival Week”, that was the theme and on the weekend of our arrival the place was being well patronised, with stalls of various kinds displaying local fare and crafts etc. This was adjacent to the well-known Kenilworth cheese factory where they were doing a roaring trade with all the tourists in town. I think Nancy and I spend a lot of that weekend strolling back and forth sampling cheeses and yoghurt and buying huge homemade ice creams, along with supporting the sausage sizzles that were also close by. Art Workshop: Always seems to be a lot of ladies attend these things, I guess there were about nine or ten ladies and three blokes in our workshop alone, but they were a pretty good bunch. John Wilson was our tutor, John specialises in traditional landscape painting for which he is recognised as being Australia’s top landscape artist and he also specialises in portraying gum trees. If you are interested in that sort of art, Google his name and you will find his paintings and his gallery at Katoomba. What a fabulous teacher, he doesn’t just paint a picture and talk you through it like a lot do. John’s method is to gather everyone together then he discusses theories, methods and demonstrates mixing etc. talks about materials and how they react and then does a stage of the painting so we can all take notes and then we do our bit and so the process goes on. It’s a bit slow but thorough and he works at the pace of the slowest person demonstrating immense patience with some of the dumb and obvious questions. For all of his fame if you were asked to describe John Wilson, you would say he is a quiet congenial person liked by everybody who meets him. We de-camped on Saturday mid morning travelling home through the scenic Mary Valley via Melany, calling in at Landsborough on the way where we caught up with some old friends who have recently relocated there from the Gold Coast. Couldn’t believe how strong the wind was on the way home fortunately it was predominantly from the rear even so it buffeted us around quite a bit even though our caravan weighs over 3 tonne. Two days later the weather hasn’t improved and feels like the middle of winter instead of October.
I have attached a photo of the two paintings I managed to complete.

Painting No1

Painting No 2

Our Rural Setting Kenilworth