Newnham, and particularly the village High Street, has a strong claim to be the artistic capital of the Forest has a strong case to be the artistic centre of the Forest. From the top of the road there is the old printing works, now converted into The Severnside Press, a permanent art gallery as well as an elegant B & B. Moving down the road, there’s the Sanctuary Gallery, and I’m looking forward to viewing the banquet of art based on food and fine dining at the Sanctuary Gallery later this month.

And then, further down, there’s the George. Restored from disuse by a great team of local supporters, this is now a café, a studio for crafts people, and an exhibition centre. It’s also a venue for interesting speakers to entertain audiences. Recently we have had a presentation on the Camp Hill trust, which provides support for people at places like Taurus in Lydney and at the Grange and Oaklands near Newnham. There was also an unconventional talk by an unconventional church going comedian with a great knowledge of the history of radio broadcasting in its early days, delivered with a joke in every sentence. The speaker was Paul Kerensa, the sort of speaker that you would not dare to heckle.

The George’s last exhibition was the sadly short, one week only event, aptly named ‘Draw Large’, held at there a couple of weeks ago.

The 14 local artists invited to provide the works for the event were challenged to produce works on 1.5 metres square Fabriano paper, which is rather too large for most artists to work on in their own studios, so they were invited into the George to use the wider studios for their work. This was a challenge for our local artists, but the Innovation and imagination, producing a mixture of abstract, landscape, mystic, mythological images, and mysterious memories, shown at the sadly short one week exhibition aptly named ‘Draw Large’ at the George last week.

Among the works there were ‘The Crossing’, by Patricia Homewood, which depicts the wide Severn Estuary as seen from the Lydney Harbour that I described in a recent Forest View, and three symbolic female heads in a swirling mysterious bowl are depicted in the ‘Three Sisters’, by Dorota Rapacz. Worked in charcoal, the evocative works ‘Line of Sight’, showing a empty woodland track, and ‘Thames Low Tide’ by Chris Comins were other evocative works in an interesting and original exhibition.