artist - Frogmore Street Gallery

September Guest Exhibition

Torfaen Arts is a group of 20 members, who live in south east Wales and exhibit throughout the valleys and towns of Monmouthshire, Torfaen and Powys. Conceived almost 20 years ago and given a grant for exhibition equipment they started showing their work in schools, community hubs and leisure centres. However it wasn’t long before they developed their outlook and skills, taking their art to the public as they believe that Art transforms spaces.

‘Through an artist`s eyes’

Denise Jones
Denise was born in Cwmbran but lived for a number of years in West Wales before returning to Cwmbran.
After taking early retirement Denise decided to start painting again. Her interest in nature fired a wish to reproduce the trees, skies and seas she sees around her. Denise is fascinated by the shapes and colours of plants and clouds, which provide her with opportunities to spend many hours of enjoyment and opportunities to express and develop her skills. Her goal is to see her voice and thoughts coming through in the work she produces, many of which are memories of living and holidaying in Wales.

John Howles
John is a photographer and digital designer based in Cwmbran.
John got his first camera in 1977 and his first real computer in 1991. Since then he has used both together in his professional and personal life, having learned to program and to design using both.
He has always been inspired by the sea (in fact water of any kind) and at one point he cycled around the whole of the Welsh coastline for charity, sleeping in a tent and photographing landscapes and seascapes as he went.
John is fascinated by digital design using a blend of photography and other elements. He has managed various projects for companies, churches and local groups.

Ann McMail
There is beauty to be found in many things places, people and nature.”
Ann finds much of her wonder and inspiration in the valley town of Blaenavon, South Wales close to where she lives. She finds that walking through the stunning mountainside provides her with solace and warmth and passion which allow the ideas to flow through her mind onto the page. Ann works in various mediums exploring and developing new ideas until they become unique pieces existing within her mind before transferring them to canvas.

Jennifer Martin
Jennifer is an artist who lives in Torfaen in South Wales.
She had a keen interest in painting from an early age at school. The real turning point in her journey back into Art came through a chance meeting with several local artists who were members a local art group called “Torfaen Arts”. Jen is inspired by seascapes, mountains and people where she uses various mediums including pastels, acrylics and oils to express herself.

Diane Rosser
Diane only took up art as a hobby when she retired, having never really painted before, she was encouraged to “try it out” by an artist friend and neighbour. She joined a local art class in the “Power Station” in Cwmbran and fell in love with it. After experimenting with various different mediums she finally settled on pastels, Chinese inks and acrylics as her favourites. Diane has been an active member of Torfaen Arts for many years; holding various positions within the group and regularly exhibits at various venues throughout the year.

Ray Rosser
Ray credits art with the opportunity to add a new dimension to his life and develop a different approach to life. He uses the natural world of colour, texture and light that he finds around him and combines it with his engineering experience and background that provide him with a sense of perspective, scale, symmetry and proportion which he expresses in his artwork. Whilst Ray has worked in various media such as oils and watercolour, his preferred medium is acrylic which he says, allows him to be more expressive and bolder by using a pallet knife where possible to avoid excess realism which best suites his style of painting. Although Ray has experimented with portraits and abstracts, his favourite subjects are landscapes and seascapes.

Cliff Lyon
Cliff generally uses acrylics on either canvas or paper. He paints various subjects including landscapes, still life and pet portraits.

Joanne Price
Joanne has a great love and interest in the Welsh language and teaching led into learning about the culture and scenery of Wales. This love of the Welsh language and culture has continued throughout her life and is a source of inspiration for many of her paintings. She also draws ideas and inspiration from exploring colour, pattern and shapes using semi-abstract forms to produce vivid paintings.
Joanne works mainly in acrylics but also likes to experiment with other media to create bold colourful pictures incorporating light, atmosphere and space. These separate sources, together with Jo’s willingness to experiment, combine to provide her with a wide-ranging portfolio which includes paintings, drawings, embroidery, fibre art, printmaking, and photography.

Karina Isles
Karina prefers to paint using watercolours,
Karina draws much of her inspiration from illustrations found in books, magazines and the internet.
Her subjects are very diverse, ranging from botanical to quirky animals.

Valerie Stewart
Val’s personal portfolio is wide-ranging and includes drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, needlework and silver-work. Val draws her inspiration from the landscapes and seascapes of Wales where she combines realism and abstractism in the same painting where her love of colour and patterns is clearly visible. Val is also passionate and excited by circus performers and gypsies. Her superb works capture the energies, forms and vivid colours of both these groups from whom she draws much of her inspiration.

Patricia Clifford
Patricia is excited and influenced by music, dance and Welsh folklore. She aims to capture the essence of the music while drawing the viewer in. Often Patricia’s pieces develop by experimentation and knowledge of the mediums she works with. Her love of colour is evident in her work and can be vibrant or tranquil.
Working in oils, acrylics and inks, her works develop through layering subtle marks on the surface that combine to give a textual quality and glazing between each layer.
Patricia is passionate about encouraging creativity and positivity.

Valerie Sinderby
Valerie uses many photos taken from lots of holiday destinations which often lead her to take a journey of rediscovery, and which encourage her to produce a painting.

Jane Jones
Over time Jane has tried various different mediums. However, she continues to be drawn back to acrylics.
Jane lives close to the sea in a beautiful part of Wales and finds inspiration for her works in her surroundings, especially the sea.

Steve Reardon
Like many others Steve gains enormous inspiration from the Welsh landscape around him. This together with the people and so many childhood memories, provide him with much of his inspiration and enjoyment. Steve mostly works in acrylics and charcoal.

Jane Rosair
Jane paints many different subjects, but her main love is landscapes, especially those in the beautiful part of Wales in which she lives. These provide much of her inspiration, and together with animals and flowers which also feature in many of her paintings, give her much enjoyment. Jane predominately works in acrylics where she has developed a style that incorporates a mix of exaggerated colours and unexpected hues. She places loose brushstrokes side by side with the intention of producing a loose, vibrant and uplifting painting.

Lorna Savidge
Lorna mainly creates landscapes in acrylics and mixed media. She admits to being by nature a bit of a perfectionist, but ageing eyes, bigger brushes, a more forgiving inner critic together with a willingness to experiment have allowed her to develop a more expressive style which she calls ‘catar-abstr-act’.
For Lorna, painting is all about being dynamic. She often revisits old works and overlays them with new brush strokes and collage, where these changes and alterations then become part of the creative journey for both the work and Lorna herself.

Jill Powell
Jill is a surreal, mixed media artist with a love of surrealism and abstract impressionism in art, esteeming the works of Salvador Dali, Rene Mageitte, Joan Miro, Andre Masson and Max Ernst.

Exhibitions

June Guest Exhibition

From The Mountains to the Sea, Engraved

Kathleen Littler

Abergavenny based artist, Kathleen Littler, works primarily in the medium of wood engraving with relatively small works but sometimes expanded into large collages made up of fragments of engravings to express her ideas on a big scale. Alongside some of her engravings there are watercolours and pencil drawings related to specific subjects.

Originally a native of Pembrokeshire, many of her designs are inspired by that coastline, in addition to images of visits to Orkney where she has found a remarkable similarity to her early coastal surroundings. These will be contrasted with her recent mountain environment.

Most of her work has a strong sense of place, where even a notional image such as her “Usk Frolics” of otters and kingfishers needed to be anchored in a particular setting.

Engraving is done using fine tools on endgrain hard wood to support the amount of fine detail; nowadays synthetic substitutes are often used with exactly the same effect. Most of her work is on wood which is why some appear in the round, which is the cross section of a piece of boxwood.

She has found wood engraving to be an ideal medium for the creating of a design which reflects the qualities of rhythm, pattern, movement and contrasts of light in nature. Such a technique was first introduced by the great engraver, Thomas Bewick in the eighteenth century and has been developed by many great engravers since.

In our own times, the medium has been re-invented as an art form in vibrant and original ways; a truly contemporary medium for expressing ideas and comment on the age we live in.

She uses a Victorian platen press to print her engravings by hand from the block. This is a highly skilled process which can require as much time and patience as the original design and cutting of the block.

There will be an opportunity during the course of the exhibition to attend a demonstration of the technique of engraving, and more of Kathleen’s work can be seen at www.kathlittler.co.uk

Exhibitions

January Guest Exhibition

” All 4 One”

January 4th – 30th

This exhibition brings together four artists and ex-colleagues who worked together at the University of Glamorgan and who have remained friends and sometime co-exhibitors for more than thirty years. We especially feature the work of Graham Talbot here whose creativity as a sculptor and painter deserves recognition. Moreover, the exhibition is a tribute to Graham’s good humour, inventiveness and generosity, qualities that were an essential element in creating such a happy working environment in the studios for teaching staff and students alike and which emerge here in his recent reworking of historical works of art, such as Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors.

***What the f…? (an even bigger Lebowski)***
(Donor artist Hans Holbein, 1497-1543)

Graham Talbot – Biography

Graham was born in Ebbw Vale in 1949 and now lives and works as an artist in Govilon, Abergavenny. Having started his working life as an engineering fabricator for British Steel, Graham then left to pursue his art at Newport College of Art and St Martins School of Art, London, where he studied sculpture under eminent artists such as Anthony Caro. Very much later he added to these achievements with an MA from University of Glamorgan. After leaving art college, Graham had a long career working as senior art technician and lecturer at University of Glamorgan (originally Pontypridd School of Mines before becoming the Polytechnic of Wales and now known as USW). During his time there, he also supported the curation of exhibitions in the University’s Oriel y Bont as well as exhibiting his own work in Wales and abroad. Graham pursued his own art practice throughout his career, mainly in sculpture using a wide variety of materials and processes. His creative practice has been informed by an eclectic range of sources, including literary and musical, and is recognisable by its wry sense of humour that takes in both the absurdity and the sadness of the human condition. The paintings in this exhibition were completed between 2021 and 2023 and mark a new departure for Graham.

Alan Salisbury – Biography

Alan was born in Preston, Lancashire and studied painting at Manchester and Liverpool Colleges of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. He has lived in Wales since 1974 working at the University of Glamorgan where he was Principal Lecturer in Painting and Field Leader in Arts and Media. He is a member of The Welsh Group and a full member of The Royal Cambrian Academy (RCA).

He has exhibited widely throughout the UK, in Europe and the USA. In 2005 he was Joint First Prize winner in the Liverpool School of Art Alumni Open Competition. In 2008 he was awarded First Prize in the Wales Portrait Award 2 Competition and was first prize awardee in The Wales Contemporary in 2020

Chris Nurse – Biography

Chris Nurse studied Printmaking at the Royal College of Art before completing a Rome Scholarship in 1991 and Cheltenham Fellowship in 1992. He worked in various roles as a Senior Lecturer in Art Practice at University of South Wales, including latterly as curator of the Museum Art Collection and gallery. He has exhibited internationally in Japan, USA, Germany, Italy and UK.

Chris’ work generally employs humour to explore motifs taken from the everyday and popular culture. His contribution to this exhibition is divided between two separate areas of his practice; a set of chiaroscuro woodcuts completed in 2003, as illustrations to Pyramus and Thisbe, the play within the play of William Shakespeare’s, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a recent series of collages based on TV testcards.

The Pyramus and Thisbe woodcuts were commissioned for a limited edition artist book made in collaboration with Nicolas McDowell, of the Old Stile Press (https://www.oldstilepress.com/) based in the Wye Valley. The tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe bears similarity to the story of Romeo and Juliette but is enacted comedically by the rustic mechanicals, Bottom the Weaver and Peter Quince the Carpenter. In Chris’ series of prints, he evolved into Bottom and Nicolas into Quince.

The collages, such as, BBC Bacon Butter Cheese, or Bradford Bradshaw Crow, reflect Chris’ peculiar nostalgia for the patterns displayed on screen between broadcast sessions before television was programmed wall to wall. He have strong memories of sitting trance-like during wet holidays in anticipation for the start of children’s television. Testcard F with the girl with her toy clown is so random; He wonders, what else could occupy this space?

Frances Woodley – Biography

Dr Frances Woodley lives and works in Cardiff. She is an artist, collaborator, writer and curator. Her cross-disciplinary practice currently uses digital painting, printing and collage as well as physical collage and small-scale construction. She is represented in Welsh public collections and ArtUK. Recent authored publications include At Cross Purposes: Three-way conversations between two artists and a curator (Aberystwyth University, 2021) and ‘Reproductions and Reimaginings: Reflections on an Interconnected Practice’ in Painting, Photography and the Digital ed. Carl Robinson (Cambridge, 2022).

The Dressing Station, 2024 General with Cherry

Exhibitions

February Guest Exhibition

“Between a Rock and a Soft Place”

1st February - 2nd March

A solo exhibition by Chrissie Thompson from the Pigsty Studio in Herefordshire.
A profuse and expressive artist working mainly in acrylics and mixed media, influenced by the contrasting hard and soft landscapes of the wild west coast of Cornwall and the drama of the Welsh Marches.

Chrissie uses a pallet knife, and a soft dry brush to achieve a blend of texture and softness, painting in her studio at the bottom of the garden with views of the Skirrid, Garway Hill and Hay Bluff as a backdrop.
She also paints en plein air on the rocky coast of Cornwall and the gentler landscapes of Devon.