The Art Shop, Abergavenny is curating regular exhibitions at the Michelin starred restaurant, the Walnut Tree Inn, showing works by some of our most dynamic and creative artists. 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.

The Art Shop has a complete catalogue of artwork including full artists statements and prices. 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.

 


HELEN BOOTH – ‘My recent paintings concentrate on the limitless variations of the single dot. Often, the dots follow disjointed lines or crowd together in amorphous blocks. Sometimes they are destroyed by gravity with dripped paints. The works explore both an impulsive and repetitive way of mark-making that is both gestural and meditative. Straight and dynamic lines often appear alongside the more gossamer transient dots in the paintings.

The dot itself can be many things to me, a puncture wound, a beginning, an end, an existence, or a loss. It can be the end of a sentence or punctuation in a landscape. It can symbolise both life and death – a complete stop.

My restrained palette creates work that focuses on the mark without the distraction of colour.

My residency in Iceland has honed my practice. Standing in what can only be described as a Divine landscape has reinforced my personal belief that Nature is the most potent force and that trying to capture the experience of Nature in its purest form is essential to me as an artist. In life and in Nature, the cycle of birth and rebirth is key.’

In 2019 Helen received a Pollock Krasner Award from New York for her painting and also 1 of the 12 International Abstract Painting Awards from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation in USA. Helen Booth is exhibited at various galleries throughout the UK and her work is held in several private collections around the world. In 2018 Booth won the Glynn Vivian Prize for Painting at BEEP International Painting Prize. Helen studied at Wimbledon School of Art, graduating in Fine Art Painting in 1989s.

 

LILY IRWIN – ‘My work is inspired by emotion, childhood, loss and fleeting moments from the everyday; what I seek to find is some way of recapturing and distilling these feelings. Fundamentally searching for something expansive, deeper and beyond myself.’

Lily’s work is rooted in observational drawing, finding the seeds of inspiration in the world around her – the past also plays a dominant role, exploring characters and their worlds through sources like architecture, photographs, letters and film. She uses many different materials in her paintings, such as lime wash, gouache and crayon.

Lily is an Irish artist based in London. Lily graduated from the Cambridge School of Art and The Royal Drawing School.

 

FLORA MCLACHLAN – ‘I work in my print workshop in West Wales, on the edge of a wild moor, surrounded by lichened trees. I’m a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE). I am currently doing an MA in Fine Art at Aberystwyth School of Art.

My work grows out of the experience of observing the landscape and the process of translating this experience into print. I want to evoke a single charmed moment out of time, a magical vision that stills. The scene is our ancient and enchanted landscape, roamed by guardian spirit-like animals, shadowed by woods where the holly springs green amongst the bare oaks and beeches. I am inspired by the fairy tales I grew up reading, and by the motif of the quest in the medieval romance poetry I read during my English degree.

For me etching is a slow and reflective process. I want the image to look like a weathered relic from the distant past, briefly come alive for us to see. I also make lithographs, drawing freely with crayons, pen and wash onto the lithographic limestone. Lithography gives a painterly immediacy. It’s such a direct and spontaneous approach to making an image and I find it complements etching really well.’

 

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.