Tag: Peoples Favourite

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People’s Favourite Painting at Autumn RAS Exhibition 2023

Site logo imageROYSTON ARTS SOCIETY

Exhibition success & half-price membership offer

Royston Arts Society held its Annual Autumn Exhibition in Royston Town Hall over the weekend of 29th September to 1st October as part of the Royston Arts Festival. From all points of view, the event was the most successful in a decade. We displayed a total of 330 paintings and 515 greeting cards created by 65 artists. Sales amounted to almost £4000 and two thirds of the exhibiting artists sold something.

  

The exhibition was very well received by the visitors and the favourite picture award was won by Tina Bone for her painting entitled “Blue and Gold Macaws and Swamp Hibiscus” (see picture).

Members of Royston Arts Society can enter paintings into both the Autumn exhibition and the Online Members’ exhibition plus the ongoing exhibition in Royston Library.

They can also attend painting sessions twice per month and an art demonstration given by a professional artist most months.

At the moment, new members can join RAS for half price; £12.00 for adults and £7.00. This membership will run until 31st March 2024 giving new members ample time to sample the art demonstrations and painting sessions; also to exhibit some work in Royston Library.

For joining details click HERE

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1501 Macaws voted People’s Favourite 1st October 2023!

Thank you so much to all those lovely people who voted for my Parrot painting as their favourite in show at Royston Arts Society Annual Exhibition in the Town Hall at Royston this last weekend. Wonderful – I am on “Cloud 9”!

…UPDATE 1st October 2023: This painting was hung in Royston Town Hall as part of the Royston Arts Festival and Royston Arts Society Annual Art Exhibition. It was voted the Favourite Painting – lovely!

Also available as a 1,000 piece traditional jigsaw puzzle (part picture – see below). If interested, please message me.

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This painting first came to life in February 2015. I hoped to finish it by the first weekend in July 2015 so that it could be displayed at my Cambridge Open Studios (COS) Exhibition when my studio was open all four weekends in July. However, it was displayed sparsely-done at COS because several commissions and other artwork for exhibitions meant that it had to be put on the back burner for most of 2015. I started painting it again in January 2016 – it was not completed until 7th July: several commissions, too much golf, darts, tennis, badminton and bowls!

It is a fun picture, designed completely in my mind’s eye, using a very useful resource photograph courtesy of my golfing friend Martin Johns (two lower right birds), and a couple of my own resource pictures taken in 2014 at Banham Zoo. The background is how I would imagine a jungle to be, although I did look up the swamp hibiscus as I felt the painting needed a bit of red with all that blue, yellow and green! It was a relief to finish it, but it left a bit of a hole as it was great fun painting it. I have tried to capture the individuality of each parrot – even though they all look the same, every facial pattern is different (like a thumb print in humans). Macaws are “zygodactyl” which means they have four toes, the first and fourth of which point backwards, and the middle two frontwards. Toucans and Woodpeckers also share this characteristic – a bit of information for your next natural history quiz!