Artist Demonstration – 9 January 2026
William Newton
Marine Scene in Watercolours

This artist demo will take place on Friday 9 January 2026 in Market Hill Rooms, Fish Hill, Royston SG8 9LB (map). The demo will start at 7.30pm and end at 9.30pm.
Free for members of Royston Arts Society – Non-members £4.00 payable in cash on the door.
No need to book!

William Newton is a highly experienced artist and demo artist, who has hosted successful demos in the local area in recent years and in Royston in 2018.  He is a full time professional artist working on gallery, exhibition and privately commissioned paintings.  

He has enjoyed a number of very successful ‘sell out’ one-man exhibitions and has exhibited at various London locations, including the Barbican, the Mall Galleries, the Guildhall and numerous commercial galleries.

Largely self-taught, he works in most mediums, on almost any subject-matter, notably marine painting and landscape etc. and is the author of the Leisure Arts book ‘Painting with Watercolours’.  Bill is a member of various Art Societies, including the London Sketch Club and is also a busy demonstrator for a well-known Art Materials Company and runs regular painting workshops and demonstrations for Art Societies. A practising Art Tutor, his paintings are held in private and corporate collections worldwide.

Click here to see some of Bill’s work.

Artist Demonstration – 14 November 2025
Sebastian Aplin
Still Life in Oils – Boots !

This artist demo will take place on 14 November 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Fish Hill, Royston SG8 9LB (map). The demo will start at 7.30pm and end at 9.30pm.
Free for members of Royston Arts Society – Non-members £4.00 payable in cash on the door. No need to book!

Sebastian is an experienced painting teacher with an MA in Fine Art from the University of the West of England (UWE) and 8 years experience as a painting tutor on Cardiff Metropolitan University’s COAS courses.

Now located in Cambridge, he is bringing painting enthusiasts together for courses at the Stapleford Granary that are designed to cement a sound understanding of how painting works. These courses are directly linked to his own art practice since they are the product of his evolving research on the fascinating choices we make in the journey between looking and painting.

Sebastian’s works have been included in exhibitions by the Royal Watercolour Society, Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the Mall Gallery (London).

For more info please see www.sebastianaplin.com

Artist Demonstration – 10 October 2025
Malcolm Cudmore
Landscape Studies in Pan-Pastels

This artist demo will take place on 10 October 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Fish Hill, Royston SG8 9LB (map). The demo will start at 7.30pm and end at 9.30pm.
Free for members of Royston Arts Society – Non-members £4.00 payable in cash on the door. No need to book!

Malcolm is an observational artist living and working in the Waveney Valley on the Norfolk/Suffolk border. Where possible he prefers to draw and paint directly in front of the subject – aiming for an objective likeness while also expressing something about how he feels about it. He uses traditional drawing and painting techniques and materials but also practises drawing directly onto an iPad. 

Malcolm demonstrates and runs workshops for art clubs and societies across the UK. He uses Derwent pencils, Daniel Smith oils and watercolours and Pan Pastels in his work and demos. 

He is currently President of Norfolk and Norwich Art Circle and Chair of Harleston and Waveney Art Trail and also a member of several other painting groups including Southwold Art Circle, East Suffolk Plein Air Painters and the Thursday Painters (a plein air painting group). He is currently the joint organiser of two life drawing groups and a Silver Signature member of the UK Colour Pencil Society.

Royston Arts Society
Autumn Exhibition 2025

Our Autumn Exhibition will be held in Royston Town Hall (map) over the weekend of 26th to 28th September 2025. There will be over 300 framed and unframed paintings by over 50 talented artists plus a wide variety of greeting cards. These are all for sale at affordable prices.

The exhibition is a major part of Royston Arts Festival and the opening hours are –

Free admission and the opportunity to vote for your favourite framed painting – we hope to see you there!!!

Artist Demonstration – 11 July 2025
Cathy Read
Architecture in Vivid Acrylics

This artist demo will take place on 11 July 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Fish Hill, Royston SG8 9LB (map). The demo will start at 7.30pm and end at 9.30pm.
Free for members of Royston Arts Society – Non-members £4.00 payable in cash on the door. No need to book!

A visit to Manchester’s City Gallery inspired Cathy’s fascination with art and discovering the painting ‘Work’ by Ford Maddox Brown was when she realised the power of art to tell inspiring stories.  Cathy is self taught. Her earlier paintings were predominantly circle based abstracts later developing into urban landscapes, fuelled by a lifelong interest in buildings.

Cathy captures memories and emotions by re-imagining iconic architecture using explosive, colourful drops and trails of paint, held together with a structure of white lines. Inspired by looming, dramatic urban and industrial architecture, she draws on influences from various cities in the UK. She previously worked as an Occupational Therapist, using large art projects to help develop fine motor skills in children.

Paintings are regularly exhibited with the Society of Women Artists in London and she was awarded the Barbara Tate Memorial Award in 2015.  Her painting of St Catherine’s College Quad, commissioned by Oxford University Press, is in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Her works are also held in corporate collections.

In 2017, she was shortlisted for Artist and Illustrators Artist of the Year and received the Wild and Tame award.  She appeared on Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year in 2016 and 2017.

Cathy exhibits her paintings around the UK, Europe, and is in collections as far afield as Canada, Africa and New Zealand.

Originally from Manchester, she now lives in a chapel near Buckingham which she converted with her husband. She lives close enough to London to get her Urban Architecture fix when needed.

For more info please see cathyreadart.com

Artist Demo – 13 June 2025
Julie Arnall
Intaglio printmaking techniques – Mono-printing

This artist demo will take place on 13 June 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Fish Hill, Royston SG8 9LB (map). The demo will start at 7.30pm and end at 9.30pm.

Free for members of Royston Arts Society – Non-members £4.00 payable on the door. No need to book!

Julie Arnall MA Fine Art will demonstrate monoprint techniques by drawing onto an inked plate, and using paper stencils and natural objects such as leaves and feathers to build a print from layers of coloured ink.

Julie originally studied BA Three Dimensional Design at Middlesex Polytechnic, and worked during the Nineties designing and producing ceramic tiles and door furniture for domestic interiors, exhibiting at trade fairs and exhibitions and had work was featured in company showrooms and print advertisements. She also began teaching art and design courses in higher education.

In 2002 she completed an MA in Fine Art at the Wimbledon School of Art and then worked as an artist, showing traditional and digital prints at exhibitions in London, New York and Tokyo. During this period, her ‘Chandeliers’ series of photoetchings were reproduced by the Art Group as posters.

Julie has also worked as a lecturer at Wimbledon College of Art (University of the Arts London) tutoring in the BA Fine Art/Theatre Life Drawing Unit, and various other courses as well providing workshops, and presentations for local schools. She also created and delivered short courses on Photoshop, Life Drawing and Printmaking.

Julie lives in Hertfordshire and teaches drawing, printmaking and life drawing classes for adults in the local area and continues her printmaking and drawing practise, exhibiting locally and submitting work to national competitions. Click here to see Julie’s Instagram page.

Royston Museum is open from 10.00am to 4.00pm, Thursdays to Sundays.
The exhibition is open until 8 June 2025.

Royston Arts Society is delighted that our annual exhibition of art by our talented members is returning to Royston Museum (map) for the first time since 2019.

Twenty-five local artists are exhibiting around 100 paintings, all for sale at affordable prices, plus a wide variety of greetings cards.

The paintings cover a very wide range of media, subject matter and style; there is something that will interest everyone!

Artist Demo – 9 May 2025
Susan Clare
My Underwater Life – Marine Creatures in Acrylics

This artist demo will take place on 9 May 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Fish Hill, Royston SG8 9LB (map). Please note that this and all subsequent artist demos will start at 7.30pm and end at 9.30pm.

Over 30 years ago, Susan went to Jamaica using her sub-aqua training as a passport to a 6 month travel adventure. This trip turned into a fully fledged career in scuba diving. Since returning to the UK in 2013, she has been searching for a way to share her love of the underwater world through her art.  Susan’s latest body of work celebrates the creatures, colours and atmospheric depths that inhabited her daily life in the Caribbean reefs.

Susan paints in watercolours, acrylics and mixed media. She is currently aiming her paintings towards improving ocean awareness, so that the viewer can feel connected with and protective of our natural world.  Having spent most of her adult life in Jamaica, she paints her tumbling tropical garden, faces full of character and the Caribbean reefs and adds atmosphere using ambiguous passages of texture and light, or colour and pattern. 

Susan leads workshops, give talks/demos to art groups, takes commissions and guides painting trips to the Caribbean as well as being included in numerous exhibitions.

For more info please see www.susanclare.art.

Artist Demo – 11 April 2025
Fiona Wilson
Figurative Extraction: Expressive figure studies in mixed media

This artist demo will take place on 11 April 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Fish Hill, Royston (map). Please note this and all subsequent artist demos will start at 7.30pm and end at 9.30pm.

Fiona is a mixed media artist working from her Bedford studio.

Working directly from life and using music to draw on memories, imagination and the sub-conscious, her approach is expressive and semi-abstract with a foundation in observational drawing. Her aim is to capture emotive energies and draw on her experience in visual communications to aid pictorial design and visual narrative. Figurative elements are developed or extracted from initial layers of abstracted marks and there’s a deliberate ambiguity to provoke the viewer to search deeper. What is obscured or absent is often as important as what is revealed.

Fiona has work in personal collections, undertakes commissions and illustrates for books and film.

She co-founded Balcony Art & Design Studio in 2017 and consults on visual communications and social media. Fiona also co-founded and leads Frescoes Art Club as Artist in Residence, and has recently launched Ampthill Art Club in collaboration with ceramicist Amanda Silk.

For more info please see www.fionawilsonart.com

Artist Demo – 14 March 2025
Rodney Kingston
An ‘Old Rocker’ in Oil

This demonstration will be held on 14 March 2025 in Market Hill Rooms, Royston (map) but please note that this demo and all future RAS demos will start at 7.30pm and finish at 9.30pm.

Rodney studied art and design at Wimbledon School of Art followed by a graphic design degree at Camberwell College of Arts and has worked on printed publications since 2006.

For many years he dabbled in oil painting until a desire to become a better painter led him to attend a figurative art course in 2013. This experience confirmed a love of oil painting which has developed into a career through a range of regular painting endeavours and ultimately becoming a full time professional artist last year.

After enjoying the experience of painting from life on the street in an outdoor quick-paint event this gave him a new approach to painting, so he now paints the vast majority of his work with the subject in front of him. Inspiration comes from everyday life – people, places, still life objects – and the challenge of translating three-dimensional subjects into a convincing two-dimensional oil painting.

Rodney has been a Contestant on Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year 2019 and on Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year in 2017. He has had his work in numerous exhibitions including the Royal Institute of Oil Painters Annual Exhibition at the Mall Galleries and has written articles that have appeared in The Artist magazine, Waitrose Food magazine and Leisure Painter magazine, amongst others.

For more info please see www.rodneykingston.com