Venue: Lydiate parish hall 288 Southport rd L31 4EQ. Times 10am to 3pm. A monthly class, second Sunday of each month. Fee £35 per class. Possibly a weekly Wednesday afternoon class 1pm to 3pm, fee £13.

Your own personal journey to develop how to see the world and to capture it in your art.

All beginners new to art, think photographically (representational) and paint that way. Reality is depicted as you see it, giving an illusion of reality. Fine to a degree, but at some point you will want to get more out of your art, rather than just copying. Working semi & abstract art allows you to escape this narrow way of creating, by means of deforming, reducing and simplifying reality and where your only limitations are your ability to be creative, requiring courage to take chances!

Even if you return to representational art, what you learn from this process will improve your technique.

Yes, you need to be guided through the transition, but the rewards will be inspiring. Remember, working this way there is no wrong or right way of producing art. It's solely down to you being able to express what you feel, see, about the world around you. You can express your feelings for a subject by drawing upon your imagination, use of colour, mark-making and many other ways that transcend he purely visible world.

This gives the artist enormous power and scope to produce art

Between classes you will be encouraged to research the subject, perhaps starting with the Impressionists who challenged the assumptions of the Renaissance art tradition. Rather than focusing on appearances in the visible world, modernism argued that art can be about the unseen rather than just what we observe, as a camera does.

It's worth noticing that all the great artists started painting representationally, but at some point they tired of this one way of seeing the world around them. Here are some of the better known artists who did exactly that.

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