Members Exhibitions

The Royston Arts Society Members Exhibition started life back in 2011 as the Winter Exhibition. This was held in the Tavern Gallery in Meldreth over a three week period in February. The Tavern Gallery closed down in 2014 and we moved the exhibition to Val Pettifer’s Old School Studio in Whittlesford. It was held for 10 days in April and we renamed it the Spring Exhibition. Both the Winter and Spring exhibitions displayed around 60 – 70 framed and unframed paintings created by RAS members.

In 2016 we moved the exhibition to the Royston Museum and Art Gallery. This venue allowed us to have a much longer exhibition; two months from mid April to mid June. Since it now spanned Spring and early Summer we renamed it as the Royston Arts Society Members Exhibition. We held four exhibitions from 2016 through to 2019, exhibiting about 60 – 70 framed paintings, a similar number of unframed work plus greetings cards. Since the exhibition was running for a longer time we were able to allow members to submit replacement paintings for those that had been sold. Royston Museum proved to be the most successful of the three venues.

The Covid pandemic prevented us from holding any face-to-face exhibitions in 2020, so we decided to try to create an online members exhibition.

Online Members Exhibitions

The first online exhibition was held from 1st May to 30th June 2020. It was a small, slightly experimental, exhibition hosted on the main RAS website. We displayed a total of 61 framed and unframed paintings from 19 artists. Members were allowed to replace paintings that had been sold at the exhibition.

We believe that we were the first small local art society to attempt an online exhibition and we were very pleased that we got a good reception form the general public as well as RAS members.

Buoyed by this success we modified the format and launched the second online Members Exhibition in 2021. This ran from 17th April through to 17th June and we exhibited a total of 180 framed and unframed paintings created by 30 RAS members. This exhibition was very well received and the value of sold paintings was greater than at most previous members exhibitions.

We also ran an online Members Exhibition in 2022 and we are planning to continue the Members Exhibition as an online only event; running for about two months from late Spring to early Summer. The event will continue to be limited to RAS members and we now charge a modest commission on all paintings that are sold during the exhibition.

Over the years we have developed some guidelines that we ask artists to follow if they wish to enter paintings into one of our online exhibitions. The paintings should also meet our normal criteria for exhibiting “live” at exhibitions in Royston Town Hall or the Library. For an online exhibition we need jpeg files of the submitted paintings and we have also developed criteria for these files and the sales process itself.

Click on the items below to view these exhibition entry criteria.