Chidham Art Group exhibition this week

Exhibition spokesman Nicholas Langhorne said there would be 24 exhibitors showing a wide range of work.

“The group has been going almost ten years, and we meet on Thursday evenings. It’s life-drawing mainly, but for the exhibition, we have said to the members ‘You don’t have to bring life-drawing into it. You can bring whatever you like into it, arts and crafts.’”

The group exhibit every 18 months to two years – “whenever someone says it is about time we had an exhibition!”

Nicholas said belonging to the group offered an important discipline: “If you work on your own, then time just disappears. It is good to get together, but there no instruction. We just get on with it. There is no critique. We just all do our own thing.

“The exhibition, as opposed to the Thursday evenings, is a chance to expose yourself to critique and observation. It’s the chance to appear in public!”

But as he says, artists can be sensitive. Nicholas believes the worst thing you can to do an artist is say “That’s nice” and walk on. To dislike a piece would almost be better, providing you are prepared to enter into a dialogue. It’s the discussion that matters as far as Nicholas is concerned.

As for his own work, Nicholas describes himself as hugely interested in texture: “I like to think what I do is quite original. I am working hard on harmony, on texture and also the definition of texture. I would like to think I am bringing to the exhibition something you wouldn’t necessarily usually see.

“So what is texture which gives vitality to form and colour, due to its perceived surface quality? Nature abounds in texture at every scale, be it the eye of a fly or the surface of the oceans. In music, texture is defined as the interrelationship between melody, rhythm and harmony, which leads to considerations of transposing such meanings into visual art.”