PATRICK HERON: ABSTRACT COLOUR PLAY

PATRICK HERON: ABSTRACT COLOUR PLAY

Live class WEDNESDAY 17th September 2025

14 Days Recording Access comes with every ticket 🔥🖍

Taught By Jo Blaker

Hosted by Luisa-Maria MacCormack

Join Jo Blaker for a session devoted to abstract colour play, inspired by the dazzling work of British painter Patrick Heron. Known for his bright, luminous none figurative works Heron explored the interaction of colour across his 50 year career. He said “a colour doesn’t really exist until it’s in juxtaposition with another”. For a 20 year period, his palette consisted of a limited range of unmixed hues, and excluded black & white completely.Using Heron’s paintings as the starting points for our own compositions we will focus on play, as opposed to directly copying his work. We will concentrate on investigating, as he did, the relationships between colour and building our own understanding of this fascinating aspect of visual language. Working with palettes and motifs taken from his work we will play with elements of his work, whilst creating our own abstract colour works.In this class we’ll also learn about his composition process and try this for ourselves, to help us overcome any fear of getting it wrong & develop trust in our judgements. Working from his oeuvre across the decades we will learn from his insights whilst uncovering our own as we draw, paint and/or collage.

MATERIALS

This is a mixed media class. Though Heron was a painter we will approach this session with mixed media - mainly working with unmixed colour as was his method.

Your tutor will work with wet and dry media.

If using wet media we recomend a heavier weight of paper, and loose leaf paper as opposed to sketchbook pages.

Coloured tape, stickers, papers as well as wet or dry drawing media are all appropriate!Scissors & glue

ABOUT OUR TUTOR

Jo Blaker (b. Huddersfield, 1983) is a visual artist based in Marsden, West Yorkshire. Jo holds an MA in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Art (2011). Since 2019, Jo’s drawing practice has focused upon the sketchbook as a site of expressive, observational work generated through the course of day to day life, with a frequent focus on landscape. Her work combines a holistic approach to drawing with playful material enquiry & a love of observation. Natural rhythms, forms & cycles often feature in her work on paper & with people. Alongside her personal practice Jo is a regular contributor to the learning programmes of leading cultural venues such as Yorkshire Sculpture Park & The Hepworth Wakefield. In 2022 Jo founded an Urban Sketch Meet & has been a regular guest tutor with LDG since 2023.

FAQs - Please read these thoroughly so you can be fully prepared for the class:

WHO IS THIS FOR:

This class is suitable for ALL LEVELS.

TICKETS:

We suggest an amount of £20. However, we understand that may not be possible for everybody. Please be honest and pay what you can afford so that we may continue to offer our sessions on this basis whilst also giving our tutors a sustainable wage.

There is also a ticket option to "Pay It Forward" to support us and our students! We offer classes for free to those who can't afford the minimum amount (If this is you please email us to join for free). This continues to ensure our classes are available to everyone!

ONCE BOOKED:

You will receive a confirmation email and be able to access information on how to join the event via your eventbrite "Online Event Page" You can access this by signing into eventbrite or creating an account using the email address that you booked with.

IN THE CLASS:

You can't be seen or heard in our classes, your audio and video are automatically turned off and there's no way these can be turned on. You can talk to us and others in the class in the chat box!

AFTER CLASS:

We love to see your drawings or anything else our classes inspire! You can share them with us by tagging us on instagram (@londondrawinggroup) or emailing us if you don't have socials.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BOOK VIA THE EVENTBRITE PHONE APP?!

We have been in touch with Eventbrite, and they have informed us that currently you cannot book tickets to online events in their app. It's very frustrating and we have been assured they are working on a solution. In the meantime, we recommend that you book tickets to our events outside of the iOS app - either via a web browser or a desktop. If you book our classes regularly we recommend deleting the eventbrite App.

RECORDING ACCESS

W e will email the recording link to everyone who has booked approx 2 hours after the live class finishes. This will be available to watch anytime within 14 days

IF YOU HAVE ANY PROBLEMS OR QUESTIONS PLEASE EMAIL:

hello@londondrawinggroup.com

And that's it!

We're really looking forward to you joining us.

Love,

LDG