This three-day course focuses on Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham period (1826–32) and the visionary landscapes he created in and around the village of Shoreham in Kent. Influenced by William Blake, Palmer transformed the landscape into an imaginative, emotional and almost spiritual experience. For many years, Palmer remained relatively obscure, until artists such as Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Paul Nash helped to bring his work back to wider attention. Sutherland famously described Palmer as “a sort of English Van Gogh.” The course encourages you to make your own connections between Palmer and Van Gogh, particularly in their expressive treatment of landscape, their use of intense colour, and their ability to transform nature into something emotional and visionary. Alongside exploring Palmer’s ideas, the course examines some of the compositional systems and techniques available to him during his own period. We look at how Palmer worked with materials such as sepia, ink and gouache, as well as his experiments with glazing. His use of a glazing medium with watercolour created effects that, in some ways, recall the layered transparency of oil painting. These same principles can be explored using acrylic and oil paint, allowing Palmer’s ideas and techniques to be translated into larger-scale contemporary paintings. The course therefore combines an exploration of Palmer’s unique vision with practical approaches that can be adapted and developed in your own work.