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Read what the Henley Standard wrote about our Summer Exhibition

I’ m not surprised that the Archers have now introduced a character from ‘sophisticated’ Henley-on-Thames into the script as there can’t be many small towns in the country, that have a cinema, a theatre, an internationally renowned museum, an annual arts festival and five galleries showing such a wide variety of both professional and amateur art and crafts, and this week it is the turn of two painters, one printmaker and one potter to show their work in the Exhibition Centre, Market Place.

Gill Hedge has a studio pottery near Oxford, where she makes wheel thrown domestic pieces in both stoneware and porcelain. She became inspired to become a full-time potter after attending a course run by Michael Cardew’s son in Cornwall ten years ago and has since attended numerous classes, including one at the Sunningwell School of Art near Abingdon. Her stoneware pieces, mainly glazed in shades of blue and green, are for everyday use, while her porcelain work, less sturdy and glazed in rich reds, golds and purples should be kept for ‘best’ or for display. She obviously likes making jugs and is displaying them in a range of different sizes, suitable for the smallest baby bear or the largest daddy bear.

The print maker is Debbie Sutcliffe who attended a foundation course at Corsham School of Art. She began as a wood engraver but for this exhibition she is showing a collection of lino cuts. The images are very simple, based on her drawings of the nude and are reminiscent of the cut paper figures created by Matisse at the end of his career in the 1950s.

Matisse cut his forms from coloured paper and stuck them onto a white background, leaving gaps so the backing resembled the drawn line, and Debbie Sutcliffe has achieved the same effect by cutting the outline of the form into the lino, and then printing the block onto coloured paper, the cut away lines remaining white.

Lucy Everitt, is an illustrator, who studied at the Edinburgh College of Art and then spent time traveling around Australia, a country which having some of the world’s most exciting and vibrant contemporary art, cannot fail to inspire aspirant artists. She is showing both watercolour paintings and drawings, including a very detailed pencil drawing called Night Waking, a dreamlike fantasy of babies floating between chimneys and over roof tops, which conjures up mental images of the Darling children from Peter Pan escaping from their nursery window to fly to the never-never land. 
Among her other drawings is a mesmerizing depiction of a strange and beautiful sorceress, wrapped in snakes. She is also showing a number of tiny, finely detailed watercolour studies of shells, feathers and flowers.
 

Jon Everitt works with acrylic paint on canvas and his pictures are also highly imaginative. Many of his tiny, meticulously painted images include boats, some rowed by people, others by animals and often filled by a disparate collection of wild and domestic creatures. One shows a man who is rowing across a tossing sea, his boat empty but for a goldfish bowl containing a swimming fish, while in a bright red pedal boat are seated a vicar and a bear carrying a bouquet of flowers. Quaintly humourous, yet maybe also symbolic of our battle to save preserve the natural world while battling against its forces.