Artists

Less than a mile from this keyboard you will find Sheffield's Botanical Gardens - a lovely and long established urban space that is normally free for the public to enter and enjoy. However, one weekend a year the gardens are taken over for an art-centred event called "Art in the Gardens". You have to pay an entrance fee.

The glass house is filled with art and there are marquees and side stalls, food concessions etcetera. Shirley and I spent ninety minutes there on Saturday morning before she went to the Age Concern charity shop where she sometimes puts in a shift.

Maybe I missed some things but I was pleased to admire the art of two professional participants and to get to talk with them. 

Roger Allen is chiefly a watercolourist based in The Peak District. Outside the tent where he was exhibiting, he had placed one of his finest pictures on an easel. It evidenced great patience and attention to detail and I found it stunningly beautiful in its green ordinariness. Called "Fin Cop", it focuses on a particular hill that overlooks The River Wye north of Bakewell. I am not at all sure that the image shared below does that exceptional  painting justice...

Here's Roger at work on a different painting...

The second artist I met was  Greta Vilidaite who gave up her academic career as a neuroscientist to concentrate on her painting - mostly in oils. Like Roger Allen, she often focuses on The Peak District and just last month one of her pictures was featured on the cover of a lifestyle magazine called "Grapevine" that is delivered free to homes throughout South West Sheffield

Titled "Quiet Under Red Skies", this is the painting I am talking about...

Greta is a walker and rock climber and like me she knows The Peak District National Park very well, finding plenty of inspiration there. The painting shown above was still available for purchase on Saturday at only £450 (US$590).

Here's Greta working "en plein air" on a different painting...

I look at admirable people like Roger Allen and Greta Vilidaite and know that I could be like them if only I had the discipline and the application to keep working on my art week in and week out - developing my innate talent. But to be honest and it's probably the same with writing, I have frittered away far too much time instead of getting stuck in and actually doing it. Good luck to them!

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/uBya0lN