Shirley Trevena RI is a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours and past president of the Sussex Watercolour Society. She has exhibited her work internationally and is the author of four books and has made three instructional DVDs. Her paintings can be seen annually at the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London and at exhibitions of the Sussex Watercolour Society. You can view the paintings Shirley made during the first lockdown on the gallery section of her website: www.shirleytrevena.com
Many a student artist struggles to make an accurate representation of the object in front of them. When I was teaching, students would relax into freely splashing paint about, finding out what happens when you put crimson red next to turquoise green or use half a credit card to scrape along the wet paint. But when it came to sitting in front of a still life, or a view across the studio, and really looking at what they could see, they would cry ‘I just can’t get it to look right, the perspective is all wrong.’