A Guided Tour with Lizzy Rowe

Cost: £35

During his long and productive life, John Egerton Christmas Piper (1903-92) created paintings, photographs and prints, designed sets for both operas and plays, made ceramics and wrote extensively about the landscape and the arts.  From an early age, he was particularly fascinated by churches, as a boy cycling around Surrey to sketch them, and so it seems appropirate that this tour should focus on three of the churches local to his home in Fawley Bottom near Henley-on-Thames.  We will travel to Iffley, Nettlebed and Bledlow Ridge, all churches with stained glass windows designed by Piper, who turned his attention to stained glass in the last three decades of his life.  At each venue we will learn about Piper's life and work, his stained glass, the churches themselves and their glorious windows.

There will be a break for lunch (not included) in Nettlebed.

Lizzy Rowe is an art historian who studied Classics at Oxford before completing an MA at the Coutauld Institute in London.  Initially an editor in book publishing, she later worked at English Heritage as a guidebook editor.  She currently lives in Oxford where she teaches Art History in primary schools and gives guided tours and talks.  She is a knowledgable and enthusiastic speaker on a wide variety of subjects.

Depart Rye Farm car park 10.15

Depart Stratton Way 10.20

Arrive back in Abingdon approx 16.30

To secure a place email info@theartssocietyabingdon.org.uk or phone 01235-522886.

Cost: £44

This major exhibition in Kew Gardens is the largest ever presentation of outdoor artworks displaying the towering sculptures and smaller-scale artworks by Henry Moore, one of Britain’s most renowned artists.

Set across Kew's iconic landscapes and world-renowned botanical collections, the Henry Moore: Monumental Nature exhibition brings art and nature together on an extraordinary scale, blurring the boundaries between sculpture and living form.  The exhibition offers an interaction with 30 monumental sculptures installed throughout the Gardens, which span Moore’s nearly 70-year career and demonstrate the varying shape and scale of his artworks.

The sculptures are purposefully placed to be in dialogue with Kew's trees and historic landscapes, revealing how sculpture can both respond to, and reshape, the space it inhabits.

Nature sits at the heart of the accompanying indoor exhibition at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art where you can discover more than 90 of Moore’s smaller-scale works, including sculpture, drawings, models and sketchbooks – some of which are rarely accessible to the public.  The gallery will also showcase Monumental Botanical Art, an exhibition featuring botanical paintings from the Shirley Sherwood Collection to complement the perspectives explored in Moore's work.

Together, the monumental sculptures and smaller works offer an immersive journey through Moore's lifelong fascination with growth, inner and outer forms, animal and botanical life, and the expressive power of the natural world.

Depart Abingdon 9.15

Depasrt Kew 15.30 

To secure a place email info@theartssocietyabingdon.org.uk or phone 01235-522886.

Milton Keynes Gallery

Fifty years after the death of Laurence Stephen Lowry in 1976, this will be the much-loved painter's first major exhibition in over a decade.

In addition to his well known scenes of industrial life, this significant overview explores the full breadth of Lowry's subject matter including portraits, seascapes,early academic studies in pencil, charcoal and pastel and enigmatic later works recalling Surrealism.

Lowry's career ran alongside huge changes in British society with much of the industrial landscape he depicted closed, cleared and replaced during his lifetime.

The artist's technique involved just five colours of undiluted oil paint: ivory black, vermillion, Prussian blue and yellow ochre; his use of flake white as a background colour is synonomous with Lowry's landscapes.

To secure a place email info@theartssocietyabingdon.org.uk or phone 01235-522886.

Further details tbc.