Sleaford Art Group to celebrate 70 year milestone
Sleaford Art Group is to celebrate its 70th anniversary with an exhibition at the Carre Gallery in the town.
Set to take place from August 31 to September 12, the show will feature works by the current members, archive materials and a few works by founder member, Harry Gregson, a former art teacher at Carre’s Grammar School. Sleaford Art Group is a long established group of individual artists who love to draw and paint in many media.
The group was started in 1956 and Catherine Batsford, Secretary for the Art Group, said there will be around 15 artists’ work on display featuring a mixture of styles, mediums and subject matter. It will be open 10am to 4pm, Monday to Saturday.
She also plans to have a display of old newspaper clippings about the group, including pictures of their fancy dress social evenings, as well as a number of Harry’s life and figure drawings, of local models. She said: “It would be lovely if anyone who modelled for the art group could come and put names to the people in the drawings.”
She said the Art Group was founded partly as local artists wanted to hold exhibitions and the Carre Gallery was partly born out of a need for the artists to find somewhere to display their work more permanently.
"Now we are a much smaller group than in its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s,” Catherine said.
"In 1959 they held an exhibition at Sleaford Library when it was based in Watergate and it attracted 800 visitors – it would be nice to repeat those figures!”
The group used to meet in a room above electrician Ray Butler’s premises on West Banks, where they could store seating and easels, but now things are less permanent.
They meet on the first Wednesday of each month from 7-9pm at Leasingham Village Hall.