France Art Retreat 2027

Intuitive Painting & Portraits

Septemper 9-18, 2027

Where Art Meets Ancient Villages

Join this France art retreat for ten days of artistic immersion and cultural discovery in the French countryside. Hosted at Perigord Retreats, this intimate gathering combines embodied movement-based painting with mixed media portraiture set amongst the medieval villages, cliffside towns and prehistoric caves of the Dordogne and Lot valleys.

Wander the cobblestone streets of Sarlat, learn to make cheese in the pilgrimage village of Rocamadour, kayak the Dordogne River, and stand before 20,000-year-old cave paintings at Pech Merle. This is a retreat built around your art, with the region itself as your subject and your studio.

What Awaits You

Intuitive Painting & Portrait Art

Begin each piece with embodied movement, letting the body and intuition build an abstract background before you refine it into a finished image, whether that’s a portrait, florals, or whatever wants to emerge. You’ll learn to see lights and darks and use a grid for proportion as you bring the piece into focus. Daily studio time with individual guidance means you leave with real skill, not just a finished piece.

Creative Community

Share your journey with fellow artists in an intimate, small group setting, culminating in a celebration of your week’s creative output.

Daily Excursions May Include…

Investment in Your Creative Journey

Your All-Inclusive Experience

It’s More Than An Art Retreat

This is not simply ten days of painting. It’s a chance to slow down inside a landscape that has been shaping artists, pilgrims and cheesemakers for a thousand years.

You’ll wake to breakfast among new friends, spend mornings wandering medieval streets, and afternoons back in the studio, pushing your portrait work further. Evenings mean a home-cooked, locally sourced meal with wine, followed by nights under the stars or solo work in the art studio.

Each studio session starts in the body before it moves to the page. You’ll use movement to quiet the planning mind and build an intuitive background, then bring in the more technical skills to refine what emerges into a finished piece.

Through the excursions, you’ll fill your sketchbook and your memory with a region that has inspired artists for centuries, from cave painters to surrealists. You’ll come home not just with a finished piece, but with a stronger hand, a fuller eye, and a process you can return to again and again.

Lulu Bea is an artist and teacher whose work centers on portrait making in many mediums. She builds retreats around real technical skill, not just inspiration, so artists leave with tools they’ll still be using long after they’ve unpacked their suitcase.

Lulu believes that true creative freedom comes from understanding foundational skills. Rather than constraining expression, technical knowledge becomes the gateway to it. When you understand how to observe proportion, work with value and light, and handle your mediums of choice with confidence, you stop worrying about “getting it right” and start creating with intention.

For this retreat, Lulu is bringing embodied movement as a way into that intention, using it to unlock intuition before technical skill takes over and refines the piece. It’s a chance to push your work with a looser, more intuitive starting point, while keeping the same foundation of careful study and observation.

Your Creative Adventure Calls