Artist Demonstration – 11 July 2025
Cathy Read
Architecture in Vivid Acrylics

This artist demo will take place on 11 July 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Fish Hill, Royston SG8 9LB (map). The demo will start at 7.30pm and end at 9.30pm.
Free for members of Royston Arts Society – Non-members £4.00 payable in cash on the door. No need to book!

A visit to Manchester’s City Gallery inspired Cathy’s fascination with art and discovering the painting ‘Work’ by Ford Maddox Brown was when she realised the power of art to tell inspiring stories.  Cathy is self taught. Her earlier paintings were predominantly circle based abstracts later developing into urban landscapes, fuelled by a lifelong interest in buildings.

Cathy captures memories and emotions by re-imagining iconic architecture using explosive, colourful drops and trails of paint, held together with a structure of white lines. Inspired by looming, dramatic urban and industrial architecture, she draws on influences from various cities in the UK. She previously worked as an Occupational Therapist, using large art projects to help develop fine motor skills in children.

Paintings are regularly exhibited with the Society of Women Artists in London and she was awarded the Barbara Tate Memorial Award in 2015.  Her painting of St Catherine’s College Quad, commissioned by Oxford University Press, is in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Her works are also held in corporate collections.

In 2017, she was shortlisted for Artist and Illustrators Artist of the Year and received the Wild and Tame award.  She appeared on Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year in 2016 and 2017.

Cathy exhibits her paintings around the UK, Europe, and is in collections as far afield as Canada, Africa and New Zealand.

Originally from Manchester, she now lives in a chapel near Buckingham which she converted with her husband. She lives close enough to London to get her Urban Architecture fix when needed.

For more info please see cathyreadart.com

Artist Demo – 13 June 2025
Julie Arnall
Intaglio printmaking techniques – Mono-printing

This artist demo will take place on 13 June 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Fish Hill, Royston SG8 9LB (map). The demo will start at 7.30pm and end at 9.30pm.

Free for members of Royston Arts Society – Non-members £4.00 payable on the door. No need to book!

Julie Arnall MA Fine Art will demonstrate monoprint techniques by drawing onto an inked plate, and using paper stencils and natural objects such as leaves and feathers to build a print from layers of coloured ink.

Julie originally studied BA Three Dimensional Design at Middlesex Polytechnic, and worked during the Nineties designing and producing ceramic tiles and door furniture for domestic interiors, exhibiting at trade fairs and exhibitions and had work was featured in company showrooms and print advertisements. She also began teaching art and design courses in higher education.

In 2002 she completed an MA in Fine Art at the Wimbledon School of Art and then worked as an artist, showing traditional and digital prints at exhibitions in London, New York and Tokyo. During this period, her ‘Chandeliers’ series of photoetchings were reproduced by the Art Group as posters.

Julie has also worked as a lecturer at Wimbledon College of Art (University of the Arts London) tutoring in the BA Fine Art/Theatre Life Drawing Unit, and various other courses as well providing workshops, and presentations for local schools. She also created and delivered short courses on Photoshop, Life Drawing and Printmaking.

Julie lives in Hertfordshire and teaches drawing, printmaking and life drawing classes for adults in the local area and continues her printmaking and drawing practise, exhibiting locally and submitting work to national competitions. Click here to see Julie’s Instagram page.

Royston Museum is open from 10.00am to 4.00pm, Thursdays to Sundays.
The exhibition is open until 8 June 2025.

Royston Arts Society is delighted that our annual exhibition of art by our talented members is returning to Royston Museum (map) for the first time since 2019.

Twenty-five local artists are exhibiting around 100 paintings, all for sale at affordable prices, plus a wide variety of greetings cards.

The paintings cover a very wide range of media, subject matter and style; there is something that will interest everyone!

Artist Demo – 9 May 2025
Susan Clare
My Underwater Life – Marine Creatures in Acrylics

This artist demo will take place on 9 May 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Fish Hill, Royston SG8 9LB (map). Please note that this and all subsequent artist demos will start at 7.30pm and end at 9.30pm.

Over 30 years ago, Susan went to Jamaica using her sub-aqua training as a passport to a 6 month travel adventure. This trip turned into a fully fledged career in scuba diving. Since returning to the UK in 2013, she has been searching for a way to share her love of the underwater world through her art.  Susan’s latest body of work celebrates the creatures, colours and atmospheric depths that inhabited her daily life in the Caribbean reefs.

Susan paints in watercolours, acrylics and mixed media. She is currently aiming her paintings towards improving ocean awareness, so that the viewer can feel connected with and protective of our natural world.  Having spent most of her adult life in Jamaica, she paints her tumbling tropical garden, faces full of character and the Caribbean reefs and adds atmosphere using ambiguous passages of texture and light, or colour and pattern. 

Susan leads workshops, give talks/demos to art groups, takes commissions and guides painting trips to the Caribbean as well as being included in numerous exhibitions.

For more info please see www.susanclare.art.

Artist Demo – 11 April 2025
Fiona Wilson
Figurative Extraction: Expressive figure studies in mixed media

This artist demo will take place on 11 April 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Fish Hill, Royston (map). Please note this and all subsequent artist demos will start at 7.30pm and end at 9.30pm.

Fiona is a mixed media artist working from her Bedford studio.

Working directly from life and using music to draw on memories, imagination and the sub-conscious, her approach is expressive and semi-abstract with a foundation in observational drawing. Her aim is to capture emotive energies and draw on her experience in visual communications to aid pictorial design and visual narrative. Figurative elements are developed or extracted from initial layers of abstracted marks and there’s a deliberate ambiguity to provoke the viewer to search deeper. What is obscured or absent is often as important as what is revealed.

Fiona has work in personal collections, undertakes commissions and illustrates for books and film.

She co-founded Balcony Art & Design Studio in 2017 and consults on visual communications and social media. Fiona also co-founded and leads Frescoes Art Club as Artist in Residence, and has recently launched Ampthill Art Club in collaboration with ceramicist Amanda Silk.

For more info please see www.fionawilsonart.com

Artist Demo – 14 March 2025
Rodney Kingston
An ‘Old Rocker’ in Oil

This demonstration will be held on 14 March 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Royston (map) but please note that this demo and all future RAS demos will start at 7.30pm and finish at 9.30pm.

Rodney studied art and design at Wimbledon School of Art followed by a graphic design degree at Camberwell College of Arts and has worked on printed publications since 2006.

For many years he dabbled in oil painting until a desire to become a better painter led him to attend a figurative art course in 2013. This experience confirmed a love of oil painting which has developed into a career through a range of regular painting endeavours and ultimately becoming a full time professional artist last year.

After enjoying the experience of painting from life on the street in an outdoor quick-paint event this gave him a new approach to painting, so he now paints the vast majority of his work with the subject in front of him. Inspiration comes from everyday life – people, places, still life objects – and the challenge of translating three-dimensional subjects into a convincing two-dimensional oil painting.

Rodney has been a Contestant on Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year 2019 and on Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year in 2017. He has had his work in numerous exhibitions including the Royal Institute of Oil Painters Annual Exhibition at the Mall Galleries and has written articles that have appeared in The Artist magazine, Waitrose Food magazine and Leisure Painter magazine, amongst others.

For more info please see www.rodneykingston.com

Royston Arts Society
Annual General Meeting 2024

The 2024 AGM was held in Market Hill Rooms on 16th January 2025. The event included a painting competition, a raffle and some lovely refreshments.

The Chair went through the the RAS events and activities during the year. He highlighted the very successful Autumn Exhibition and the Artist Demonstration programme. There were also a few areas that were less successful especially the 2024 online RAS Members’ exhibition. These will be addressed by the new Committee that was voted in at the end of the meeting.

RAS members were invited to bring along a painting that featured “A Winter Scene”. After the meeting, everybody voted for their favourite.

The winner was Peter Morgan and he was presented with his prize by the RAS Chairman.

We also had a “free to enter” raffle and this was won by Susan Sanders

Many thanks to the members who attended the AGM and contributed to the discussions. The Committee is sure that our members will enjoy the events and activities planned for 2025!

Artist Demo – 14 February 2025
Bobby Open
Royston In Watercolour

This demonstration will be held on 14 February 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Royston (map) but please note that this demo and all future RAS demos will start at 7.30pm and finish at 9.30pm.

Based in Cambridge, Bobby has exhibited across England, including exhibitions at Cambridge Contemporary Art, Cambridge Drawing Society, the Society of East Anglian Watercolourists, the Babylon Gallery in Ely and at Broadway Arts Festival.  He started plein air painting in 2012 and has taken part in events including A Brush with The Broads and the Windsor and Eton Plein Air event marking the Queen’s 90th birthday.  In 2023, Bobby won the Great Broadway Paint Off with his painting of Broadway High Street.  Other awards have included the Rosemary and Co Brushes Prize at A Brush with the Broads, and the People’s Choice Award at the Norfolk Gardens series of Paint Out.

Bobby mainly works in pencil and watercolour, enjoying the challenges and opportunities that come with watercolour: exploring what is possible with paper, brush, pigment and water; careful drawing combined with happy accidents.  As an architect, his subjects often include buildings, parts of buildings or other manmade elements, often contrasted with natural elements, or how people interact with these spaces.  Just as important as the actual subject, he looks for interesting combinations of abstract, positive and negative shapes.  Bobby also attends regular life drawing sessions and also enjoys portraiture and still life painting.  He recently started teaching workshops at Windrush Art Courses near Burford and will hopefully be running a workshop at Broadway Arts Festival in 2025.

Examples of Bobby’s watercolours can be found at instagram.com/bobbyopen

Artist Demo – 10 January 2025
Marc Jackman
The Art and Science of Artist’s Paint Making

This demonstration will be held on 10 January 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Royston (map) but please note that this demo and all future RAS demos will start at 7.30pm and finish at 9.30pm.

Established in November 2019,  Jackman’s Art Materials has a vision to create the highest quality art materials to give artist’s the best possible experience. Marc will show us how they achieve that goal.

Marc Jackman, Founder and Chief Chemist, grew up around the Art Materials industry with father Peter Jackman who has spent all his working life in the industry. Marc swapped his day job as an Accountant for an idea that would allow them to build something together; this idea was Jackman’s Art Materials.  It wasn’t long before attention to detail and making the highest quality watercolours became an obsession. This very quickly led onto formulating Traditional Indian Drawing Inks and later Acrylics. This fits with Marc’s natural interest in Science and always questioning ‘why’. 

Jackman’s mission is to create the purest watercolours possible, researching and working closely with artists. Their binder only consists of hand picked Kordofan Gum Arabic, distilled water, vegetable Glycerin and a touch of biocide making nearly all their watercolours vegan friendly.

They continue to work closely with pigment manufacturers and artists to ensure they get the best, most vibrant pigments possible and every batch is checked for quality and consistency.

The Flow Formula Acrylics have been designed to be mid viscosity, low rheology, low sag, low VOC, mid gloss, highly pigmented artist acrylic that also contain no extenders.

More information on Jackman art materials can be seen at www.jackmansartmaterials.co.uk

Free admission for Royston Arts Society members;
£4.00 fee for non-members pay on the door , no pre-booking required 

Exhibition in Royston Library

The Royston Arts Society exhibition in Royston Library was refreshed on Monday 4th November.

There are now 43 paintings on display created by RAS members – all talented local artists. They include a wide variety of subject matter painted in different media.

The are all for sale at very affordable prices. Simply talk to one of the library staff, pay in cash and take your painting away.

More Information