YOUR STAY
We serve meals at well-loved pubs and at the farm. All meals at the farm are cooked favouring local and homegrown produce.
You will stay in our traditional farm cottage, or a carefully considered neighboring cottage or barn or in the farmhouse. To be discussed when booking.
You will have the use of our swimming pool and sauna throughout your stay and we offer options to enjoy a massage at the end of the day.
If you choose to ride, your horses will be kept in our traditional stone stables and will be looked after on full livery, or, we can source horses for you.
Riding and art can be combined or you can choose a retreat focusing on one or the other.
For those on the art retreat who don’t want to combine riding we provide an option have a guided session in grooming, if you want to spend time with a horse!
The farm sits in a shallow valley, just beyond the Black Mountains and book town, Hay-on-Wye. If you choose to have time to yourself or if you want to stay on and explore the area, these are wonderful options for you.
RIDING
After breakfast head to the stables where your horse tacked up and ready to go.
The rides explore open countryside with sweeping views across the Welsh Marches and Black Mountains, we make sure our rides cover the most breathtaking countryside. By midday, we stop for lunch, which either is a picnic or at a mountain village pub.
After lunch, we ride home with plenty of canters across open hills. Back at the farm, there’s time to unwind, with a swim in the pool, a sauna or a massage.
In the evening we gather for a candlelit dinner serving seasonal, home-cooked food shared with friends.
ART
After breakfast, everyone meets at 10 am for guided hours. At 1.00 we stop for lunch served somewhere lovely on the farm, and then in the afternoon, there will be free studio time, where you can continue with your work or just flop on the sofa with tea and cake! Or… go for a long walk and chill out!
An example of what the session will look like…
Try out the papers and materials for that morning. Prepare and collect materials, make up small zig-zag sketch books with different papers. Collect the landscape with sketches and your camera to take back into the studio en plein air from suggested sites. Pin up work.
Begin with post card sized pieces of ply to draw and paint on, work in series of three to five works which inform each other, use the language of landscape painting to place the horizon and choose the colours.
Work in a series of three or five pictures and through gestural marks draw with the brush, cards and rollers to apply colour, move your paint around, draw back into your work with oil pastels or graphite. Find where you are happy between abstraction and landscape and what scale fits.
LOVE YOUR LANDSCAPE
These guided sessions led by Lois Hopwood collect aspects of the landscape using sketching au plein air and through painting and collage. In the studio we will work towards abstracting the landscape by making multiple studies in paint and graphite on small panels. Suitable for all levels from beginners to students who might want to work on their portfolios, to professional artists who want to build on previous experience.
Artist Lois Hopwood says that she loves drawing above all else because it requires you to sit still and focus. Drawing as a way of seeing.
ABOUT LOIS
Lois graduated in Fine Art painting at Newcastle University and on leaving in 1986 was joint winner of the South West Open. She has since worked as a Textile Conservator at Hampton Court Palace. And studied for an MA in Screen design at the National Film and Television School. She has worked in the Art departments of Harry Potter, Charlotte Gray and Neverland. At film school she studied measured drawing and model making.
In 2003 she moved to East Wales where she shares studios with the Potter Tony Hall and where she teaches on their ceramic and surface design workshops. They take part in Hereford Art week. In 2010 Lois won the ING Drawing prize at the Mall Galleries, was in the Re drawing open at the Oriel Davies and in Oriel Mon. She was artist in residence at Hereford college of Art for a year and has run lots of Art workshops locally and at the Oriel Davies and The Bleddfa Centre. Last year she exhibited in The Art Shop and Chapel Abergavenny and at the at The Table and the Chair Gallery Hay-on-Wye.
