SAW Open Studios 2023
We had an absolute blast over the last couple of weeks, hosting such an array of wonderful artists in our gallery space, helping them to share their creative process and their techniques with the public during the Somerset Art Weeks Open Studio event 2023.
Jon Minshull managed to finish 3 new pieces during his residency, 2 delightful canvases featuring calves on the Somerset levels, as well as a beautiful commission for a book cover. Quite an achievement considering the amount of chit chatting he was doing with all our lovely visitors.
Len Green spent 5 days working on some abstracts on paper, adding literal splashes of colour and layers and then scraping bits away. You could see him enjoying the chance to meet people and talk about art and inspiration.
Wil I Om painted with coffee, bringing to life a swan family and a meditating fox over the weekends he spent with us. As always, his work creates so much excitement among our visitors.
Sara Trenchard created a wonderful watercolour and ink sketch of our garden as well as working on landscape pieces from her sketchbook that she started on her journeys around the various corners of our land.
Monika Miller worked in paint and pencil and charcoal, with figures emerging on her paper and the play of dark and light creating human forms within chaotic mark making.
We watched as Frank Harwood started work on one of his paper maché maquette’s. Piecing together obscure cardboard shapes to create a 3 dimensional person using cardboard and wood and a glue gun to create the base shape on which he pastes layer upon layer of newspaper until a miniature character resembling the lady in his reference image emerged in paper form.
Ruary Allan introduced us to his new sub genre; AI assisted collage. We got to see him piece together various images based on prompts entered into an AI image generator which were then printed , cut out and assembled alongside other found images and packaging. Absurdities were definately created.
We had hundreds of visitors come through our doors and it was so great to see so many familiar faces and to meet so many new people. Having this community of artists come together and demonstrate their flow is such an honour and we look forward to sharing our space with you all again soon.
