We had an interesting afternoon with may entries and much discussion.
The winners were as follows:-
Tom Groom Award winner Chris Shaw , Highly commended Jacqueline Black and Kay Gale
Sketchbook Award winner Margaret Cairns, Highly commended Judith Armstrong and Rachel Boxall
Welcome to Downland Art Society
Our aim of encouraging a love of art and providing an opportunity for everyone to recognise and develop their individual talents has been an unbroken theme since we first formed in 1944. Find out more about our history.
Now more than 70 years later, we are still a forward looking and friendly art society open to both amateurs and professionals. Saturday meetings take place at our base in Walberton and feature a varied programme of demonstrations, presentations and critiques from respected local artists. Some members start early by meeting up in the pub at lunchtime before the meeting. Visitors are very welcome to come along and see what we do. Our workshops are excellent value and themes generally follow on from the demo. They are a good opportunity to try new techniques and to get to know people in an informal setting. Many people like to take advantage of the networking opportunities for sharing ideas and information, organising sketching groups and visiting exhibitions. If showing your work is important to you then Downland exhibits twice a year in one of the best locations in the area, the Norfolk Centre by Arundel Castle.
With well-known local artist and teacher, Marcus Finch as our President, Alison Woodward, a Senior Lecturer at Chichester University as Chairman and an enthusiastic Patron in Diana Levantine, Chairman of the Sussex Snowdrop Trust, not to mention an energetic new committee, Downland Art Society is well set up to continue to go forward as it has done since 1944 as a leading resource for art in the area.
See our events programme for details
Latest Galleries
This was a lovely days painting with excellent instruction and encouragement from our tutor Stewart.. We all seemed to get a lot from it and the results were pleasing. Our lovely sitter, Pip, was very patient and has a really lovely face to paint.
This was a great demo by Stewart. His sitter Richard was a delight and as you can see the result was impressive. Stewart was able to commentate throughout which kept everyone engaged and learning.
We had a lovely afternoon on 1st April 2023, getting valuable feedback on our work and enjoying hearing the critique on others. It was all constructive and helpful and we all learned something, thanks to the broad knowledge and understanding of our artist/judge, Steve Carroll who is both an artist and an art historian.
We had a lovely lively and enlightening afternoon doing Chinese brush painting with Maggie. The year of the rabbit this year so we painted many rabbits , bamboo and plum blossom. Such a friendly easy group with no judgements, just constructive advice from Maggie, a fun time was had by all.
We had an interesting Critique meeting because due to the lack of an artist to judge for us, we did a group critique, which was very good. We picked the following winners.
The Tom Groom Award - any painting framed or mounted under the subject of "Townscape" was won by Kay Gale with "A Rainy Day in Chichester".
