‘A GARDEN’

The Art Shop, Abergavenny has been curating regular exhibitions at the Michelin starred restaurant, the Walnut Tree Inn, showing works by some of our most dynamic and creative artists. This new exhibition opens on Wednesday 19 May. Come and enjoy innovative and delicious dishes by one of Britain’s finest chefs, Shaun Hill, and sit amongst art by young, emerging artists and more established stars. An atmosphere brimming over with creative energy.

For all enquiries contact The Art Shop. 01873 852690   admin@artshopandchapel.co.uk

Arts Council of Wales Collectorplan scheme available. More information via the link below.


AMY SHUCKBURGH – Amy is a landscape and figurative artist whose new work is full of colour and energy. Her drawings in pastel, mixed media collages and watercolours convey a sense of delight in the world, through playful and instinctive interpretations of scenes of bluebell woods, hillsides, gardens and still life compositions.

Amy grew up in west London where she has lived for most of her life. Her London studio was the Hammersmith home of artists Mary Fedden and Julian Trevelyan from the 1930s until 2012. For the past few years, Amy has made many drawings of the studios, their living quarters and riverfront garden, documenting the artists’ property before it undergoes total renovation. Some of these drawings are included in this collection.

Amy trained as an artist at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, the Royal Drawing School, the Slade School of Fine Art, and the St Ives School of Painting. She studied English at Leeds University and has a Masters degree in curating. Amy is an elected Associate Artist at Unison Colour and in 2019 she won the Heatherley’s Award for Drawing, for her depiction of motherhood. Amy’s drawing of Harold Pinter, done from sittings in the playwright’s final years, now hangs at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London.

Amy has recently moved to live in Somerset with her husband and three children.

CORNELIA O’DONOVAN ma rca  –   Cornelia O’Donovan plays with old folklore and poetry, but in a loose and dreamlike way. She draws particularly on tales native to the British Isles, and especially Celtic poetry and myth. Her paintings are flat, stripped of all perspective or realism, their surfaces hazy and meandering like an old tale retold a thousand times. Roughly rendered yet delicately arranged, she creates patterned compositions reminiscent of old tapestries into which she plants naïve pre-Modern motifs.

‘Working blind, working in the dark, sifting through sand with eyes shut, working backwards. I sometimes feel lost and feel only that I am compelled to make marks and put images down, I see colours everywhere and take them to the studio with me. They are fragments, snatched from dreams, and I am collecting them and ironing out tangles and hoarding and obsessing, then suddenly it is enough and I can’t see the way forward again. I am exhausted and have used it all up. I rest and the desire to record grows again. Once I am making it becomes a dialogue and a full interior world, complex and mesmerising, part of the world and nature. The privacy of the studio. The solitude. A process of acceptance. Looking around my immediate environment I see how a home, daily work and reputation in housework, a small arrangement of and groups of objects all contribute to painting. They all become part of you, learning through making.’

Cornelia trained at Royal College of Art graduating in 2006. Her work is held in private collections in the U.K. and overseas. She lives and works in London.