Guild shows life in art is never ending story

FOR its next exhibition in Henley, Reading Guild of Artists is celebrating its longevity and the ever-evolving world of art.

“Continuum: Art in the Flow”, which opens today (Friday) at the Old Fire Station Gallery in Upper Market Place, looks at how people continue to make art throughout their lives, no matter what is going on in the world.

Publicity officer Jane Somner, from Calcot, will be showing three of her paintings and visitors can look at more of her work and others in the form of “browsers”.

Jane says: “A browser looks like a deckchair, it’s made of wood and it’s like a catalogue that opens up. People can flip through it and it contains up to 15 paintings. It’s a very good way for people to buy original artworks.”

There will be 69 artists taking part, with more than 150 works on display, including paintings, original prints, sculptures, ceramics and more. It is hoped that the annual showcase of members’ work will encourage others to begin their own artistic journeys.

For Jane’s own works, she uses various techniques. She says: “I mainly work in water-based materials such as watercolour for painting and acrylic, which I tend to use more for printmaking.

“Some of the pieces I’m putting into the exhibition, such as Low Tide, are on what I call prepared paper. It’s a very high-quality watercolour paper to which I put on an adhesive.

“On top of that I put tissue paper that’s wet strength, so it doesn’t tear, and is scrunched up randomly and forms a bond with the acrylic on to the paper. It means I’m working on a surface that’s not reliable, in as much as when you put a bit of paint on, if there’s a crease in the paper, which there will be lots of, paint whizzes along the creases. It’s not a standard surface and consequently it’s quite exciting.

“With High Speed Hunter the bird of prey is done on a very high-quality mixed media paper, which is toned grey and I’ve worked with ink and paint and chalk on that.

“You’ve got to get the beak and face right. I worked from a photograph but I like the way he’s looking backwards, rather than forwards, so it forms a really nice construction.”

Fellow exhibitor Paul Whitehouse won last year’s inaugural Pauline Mercier Award for work in 3D, although he is predominantly a painter.

Jane says: “Paul won it with one of his beautiful sculptures, he is also amazing at capturing people’s likenesses. Paul has done two charcoal portraits of me, which he did in 15 or 20 minutes and they are shockingly good. He was on Landscape Artist of the Year in 2021, when they were at the Eden Project in Cornwall.”

Paul, who retired from his role as a scientist at the Environment Agency a few years ago, says: “I actually did some painting when I went to America about 40 years ago and I started getting interested again in 2016.

“I signed up for some life classes and I went to a part-time course at the Art Academy in London. I also did a year-long course in Newlyn in Cornwall, so I used to go there every two months and had about seven holidays there.”

The Crowmarsh Gifford artist usually takes drawings or photographs as his starting point. “Somebody described me as a ‘flaneur’ and I had to look that up,” says Paul.

“I think it’s basically somebody who just sort of wanders around and notices things. I’ll think, ‘That’s an interesting image, I just like the way the light catches that, the lights and the darks and the shapes’.

“I paint in oil on canvas or board, so fairly conventional and I’ve spent most of my time using oils because I think they’re very forgiving. They’re more practical than acrylics, because when things go wrong you can always scrape it off and start again.

“I don’t know why, but I have a natural palette to go to, which tends to be warm browny-greeny things.”

Paul’s submission for Landscape Artist of the Year was a painting of two figures at a railway station.

He says: “It had these diagonal bands of light and dark and it was quite a dramatic image out of something that’s very mundane, so that’s the sort of thing that appeals.”

This year’s judge for the Pauline Mercier award for 3D work is Dr Hannah Lyons, curator of art collections for the University of Reading, who will also pick the winner of the Marie Dyson Award for 2D work, which has been awarded every year since 1968.

Guild members will be on hand throughout the exhibition as stewards to discuss their work each day and there will be different artists for morning and afternoon sessions.

The guild will update social media daily so that visitors can meet the artists and see their sketch books, printing blocks and other creative materials.

• “Continuum: Art in the Flow,” Reading Guild of Artists runs until Tuesday, August 1, from 10am to 4pm daily. For more information, or search for Reading Guild of Artists on Instagram or Facebook or visit www.rga-artists.org.uk