by Maia F
I was driven up to Shrewsbury to look at a couple of art exhibitions with the rest of my arts award class. Our first stop was a small arts and crafts shop set out of the way down a side road.
The shop was fairly small, but still contained a lot of different artworks. Often these were grouped together, but these groups were not always all of one type of artwork. Some pieces were separated from anything like them.

Some of the pieces were what you might traditionally think of as art, paintings and sculpture and drawings. But there were other things that I had never considered as artwork before; I saw knitted dolls, jewellery and even pens!

Most of the artwork was beautiful and even those things that I wasn’t so sure about, such as the sculptures, were interesting to look at. I was particularly fascinated by the pens, as they were both surprisingly and pretty. Surprising because I wouldn’t have expected them to count as an artwork, but still a wonderful mix of colours.

I would have been happy to stay in that shop all day, but we had to leave to visit the Bear Steps gallery.
The gallery was almost the opposite of the arts and crafts shop. The building was larger and the art was both spread out and grouped much more obviously. There also wasn’t as much variety.
Nonetheless, I liked most of the art on display. There were sculptures of animals,primarily dogs, and sea and fieldscenes made of some kind of layered stones or crystals, that were interesting and quite nice to look at, but my favourites were the paintings. They were mostly of shorelines, rivers,and fields, and looked very realistic.
Unfortunately, we had to be finished by eleven so we didn’t get as much time to look around as I might have liked, but we did see plenty of interesting and beautiful things, and some that were entirely new to me as artforms.

Very interesting. I too have never really considered pens to be art before. You have made me want to visit both places. My favourite from your pictures is the sculpture of a dog!
I think I feel the same – those seascapes are stunning, thanks for including the photographs. They make me want to go and spend a bit of time down at the beach. The dog with the spoon in its mouth also made me smile though!
I agree, the paintings are my favourite too. Not sure at all about the dog with a spoon in its mouth, I guess it is at least pretty memorable.