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YOU know that the season of goodwill is fast approaching when the ArtHouse Gallery, located on Southport's Eastbank Street, opens its doors to its Members' Christmas Exhibition, over:- 14 November to 24 December 2023. This annual showcase is now a key event in the Region's arts calendar and provides an opportunity for savvy shoppers to snap up unique gifts from an eclectic mix of local creatives keen to reveal their latest artworks.

SCA newbie, Tracy Aston, who has been creating some kind of art for the past 4 years, only began making her exhibited, non-objective art about 18 months ago:-"I love working with shape, line and strong contrast and my work usually has a sense of movement. Currently addicted to blue and orange, I work in mixed media:- acrylic, paint pens, brush pens, fineliners, and am completely in love with water soluble crayons. I'm based in Southport and have only recently joined SCA and am so happy I did; what a place to be!"

Another newcomer to SCA, Marion Bayliss, who moved up from Somerset to Lancashire in 2022, is often found beavering away in her studio in Much Hoole:- "Painting has become my sanctuary so to speak. I enjoy using acrylics, watercolour and oils depending on the effect I want to achieve with each piece of work. Sometimes I will use mixed media such as in my latest piece:- "Winter Moon" which was mainly acrylics but I also used torn pages from an old book that I had read sometime ago. My inspiration for this piece came to me 1 evening when I went into my kitchen and through the window I saw the clouds part only to reveal the Strawberry Super Moon shining away like a lamp in the dark. I locked that memory into my virtual sketchbook to paint 1 day. I have done a series of moon pictures but for this piece I decided to make it look more wintery hence the snow sprinkled trees in the foreground."

Hot on the heels of her successful solo exhibition earlier this year of paintings and embroideries at The Atkinson in Lord Street, Birkdale based multi disciplinary artist, Carole Dawber, will also be revealing her talent when working with wet clay. Drawing her inspiration from the beauty of Nature, Carole always aims to combine realism with an aesthetic sensitivity to each chosen medium:- "I love the freedom of expression that working in clay gives me and allowing me to explore the 3 dimensional of forms. Often the same themes I am using in my professional artistic outputs of paint and textiles find their way into my ceramics, though working in clay is my chill out zone without the pressure. Reinterpreting floral landscapes is a major part of my creative direction and I often use simplified flower form, shape and pattern in the decoration of my ceramics. Working in the mouldable clay I am able to encrust the supporting form below so that there is an explosion of blooms emerging from the underlying shape. Usually I just work with a simplified colour range of white and indigo blue but in my latest pieces I have been using a more faded colour spectrum echoing pottery of the 30's and 40's such as the Sylvac Pottery and designer Charlotte Rhead."

When she retired, following a diverse career in teaching, project management and IT operations, Crosby based artist, Sue Herlihy decided that it was time to develop her more creative side. Having no formal art experience or background, Sue had to start from scratch:- "The medium I 1st explored was watercolour. This was partly because I was recommended to a tutor who specialised in watercolour, and over the past 8 to 9 years, despite wandering off in other directions, I find myself continually drawn back to the freshness of the medium."

Examples of her expressive watercolours will be on display at the ArtHouse including:- a timely seasonal reinvention freely adapted from an original photograph:- "I wanted to capture the childhood innocence of playing in snow, giving a very mundane garden setting the feel of an illustration from a children's book."

Guaranteed to provide more than a sprinkle of Christmas magic, this latest showing by members of SCA is certainly not 1 to be missed. This year's Members' Christmas Exhibition will be on display at the ArtHouse, Eastbank Street, Southport, from:- 14 November to 24 December 2023.