Last weekend, September 11-13, I attended Jean Emmons Master Botanical class at Filoli Garden outside of San Francisco. My husband and I did the 9 hour drive down from Oregon and stayed at Half Moon Bay thinking it would be a nice respite from the city and a place to relax after class….We couldn’t be more wrong. It seems to be the favorite destination for half of San Francisco as well. Why I am not sure, maybe close to the city, a nice long beach, a few decent restaurants and a fog horn that sounded every 10 seconds..… but what ever the attraction there was a constant conga lines of cars streaming in and out of the area everyday. For me it meant it took 50 minutes to go the 12 miles to Filoli and back again.

However it was worth it as the class was excellent, exactly what I needed. Jean gave an excellent talk on form, value and color on day 1. It was a nice recap for me, and a reminder of things I knew but was not applying, as I should to my paintings. We spent that afternoon doing value exercises. We practiced wet in wet, wet on dry, and dry brush techniques while maintaining the same value between colors. Excellent practice.   Jean is a very patient teacher and spent the following 2 days teaching us how to dry brush using the lowly grape as our learning plant. Grapes are surprisingly hard to paint when you need to see and paint them from the inside out.

It was a big class but Jean managed to help all of us very well.

We never actually got out in the garden so I did a fast walk on my own around the garden at noon on the last day, and a quick look at the ‘botanical room’ in the lower level of the massive homestead where our class was on the third floor. Paintings from well known contemporary botanical artists and the Bank’s Florilegium are on display in this room. The gardens are formal but there was a small area of woodland outside the walls of the garden that I preferred. It was also the coolest place in the garden and most diverse.