Alice uses “proper paper, proper brushes and proper paints”. She likes to do flowers and outside scenes in the summer. She enjoys painting holidays with her husband who works in oils and acrylics.

Alice showed us a photo taken last year in Windsor Great Park on a bright, bitter day with snow like tapioca on the ground and informed us that she was going to paint the scene in watercolours.

She’d already started work by marking out the areas she wished to keep white (the trunks of the silver birch trees) with latex and painting the sky with the paper upside down.

Many people say they can’t paint. Alice would like to strangle some teachers for putting so many off painting. If you are bad at maths, you are made to work harder, if you are bad at art you are told to give up! Art can be taught.

At a school in Twickenham Alice gave each child a daffodil flower, a bud and a leaf. One seven year old painted the flower and bud OK, but painted a rounded leaf not the spear-like shape he had in front of him. We paint what we think it looks like, not what we see. A woman painting chrysanthemums did the leaves in pairs up the stem, but in front of her the leaves were alternating up the stem. The first step is learning to see properly.

Alice then added the water of the lake in long flowing strokes with a wide brush. “It’s great painting, it’s not relaxing, you have to concentrate and it is very absorbing.” Next came the trees on the other side of the lake, but “not in bright green”. The further away something is the paler and bluer it appears. Michelangelo was the first to paint distant hills blue and they laughed at him.

Alice sells pictures at local exhibitions saying “selling your first painting is better than your first love”.

Alan Barber and other members of the club helped remove the latex masking liquid, then Alice painted in the tree trunks and foliage in the foreground. She said that this completed the basis of the picture and it would take at least a further hour to complete.

Susan asked how Alice can bear to part with her pictures. Alice said that it’s the doing that’s the most important thing.

Brian Hewes gave the vote of thanks saying that Constable had trouble with skies and needed to learn how to do them from someone else. He wished his art mistress had been a good one, “I can only recall that she gave me detention”.

Alice said she will finish the picture and bring it back to the Club so it can be used for fund raising.

David Campbell Burns (left) won the raffle.