Lisbon Study Trip

I recently attended the OCA Lisbon study visit. The trip was three days of Gallery visits lots of walking and sketching on location. Our tutors were Michelle Whiting and Diana Ali. This is the first study visit I have attended and the first time that I have met any OCA tutors and students. We arrived on the Monday and met with the other students at the hotel for dinner where we introduced ourselves before retiring to our rooms to prepare for the next day. We met in the morning and there we met our tutors and the rest of our fellow students. After our introduction we left for our first outing.

These three days were packed with visits to various places. We visited the Museo Berardo where we had an interesting guided tour of a contemporary gallery, my knowledge of contemporary art is very limited, so it was very helpful to have the guide explain the pieces in the gallery. I left with a very different view of these types of artwork than when I went in. We also visited the Paula Rego exhibition at the Casa das Historias which showed a vast collection of her sketchbook work as well as some of her final pieces. I found this exhibition to be extremely inspirational and relative to my studies. I like that she used her art to get a message across, mostly political and quite controversial. It was great seeing her sketches the line style she used the mediums and her experimentation.

We got to see some beautiful sites including the botanical Gardens which hosted an array of cockerel’s and hens, Peacocks, ducks and terrapins, the castle on the sea which was like something out of a fairy-tale with its little beach cove, a harbour and PADA artist in residence in Barreiro, who gave us access to restricted industrial estate that had incredible views across the water of the whole city of Lisbon and a great many thing to draw.

I really enjoyed meeting my fellow students and tutors. We ate amazing food, had a great time with plenty of laughs and I learned a lot from them all and from our visits as well as the guides from the museums. I got to push myself out of my comfort zone a little bit and try new things and it was very interesting seeing my fellow students work and the ways that they approached this. I came back very excited to get back in my studio and am looking forward to incorporating the things that I learnt on the study visit into my future work. I hope to stay in touch with the other students that I met and will hopefully see them again at other study visits. The tutors did an amazing job of organising the trip, giving us a great experience that I will treasure.  I had such a great time and am so glad that I went, I really hope that OCA runs more of these types of study trips.