WEST Dorset artists and makers are getting together for an Autumn show at Eype Centre for the Arts at the end of October.

Her art encompassed a wide range from prints and painting to rugs, films and photography

Lyme Regis will be given over to the Arts for nine packed days from September 25 to October 3. Visitors will be able to see art in nearly every business premises in Lyme’s main streets…

IT’S A good question: which village in West Dorset has the highest concentration of artists? I would have guessed Nettlecombe, or perhaps Symondsbury, or even Chideock; there is much more to Chideock than speed cameras, traffic fumes, and signs outside The Clock House advertising its “ugly landlord”. But then, lo, over the hills comes another [...]

FIFTY ONE cardboard gigs have been painted by children at Symondsbury School near Bridport, and they’ll all be displayed at West Bay this Sunday (April 25). Bridport’s new Gig Rowing Club has organised the Beach Boats event on East Beach between 11am and 2pm. Club chair Mike Carter will present a model gig to the maker [...]

A CAMPAIGN has begun on Facebook to bring back the Spirit of Bridport to road signs welcoming people to the town. The Spirit of Bridport is the flaxen-haired woman sat, on a throne, working with twine in the murals painted by Fra Newbery inside Bridport Town Hall. Francis Henry Newbery – known as Fra Newbery – [...]

News that stays news THE ARTIST John Skinner, when he lived in Bothenhampton, used to say to me: “Why can’t we have the kind of news which says: ‘Today John Skinner finished a xxxxing fantastic painting – and here it is’. “That’s the kind of TV news I’d like to see.” I used to agree with [...]

  ARTIST Liz Somerville is opening up her studio in Cattistock this weekend for a Christmas Sale. There’s something about her technique, and her sense of colour, which both captures and recasts the Dorset landscape, its atmosphere, its boundaries, its contours, its delights… I could write whole alphabets of praise; I really rate her work. Anyway, [...]

ARTISTS in and around Bridport and Beaminster are preparing for the first Open Studios event to be held in November. The initiative –  which runs from November 14 -22 – has been timed to coincide with the Bridport Literary Festival, the countertext09 exhibition and events, and (whisper it) the approach of Christmas. The move to [...]

GOOD piece in The Times about Reynolds Stone (1909-1979), one of the greatest 20th century letter-cutters and engravers, who lived in the old rectory at Litton Cheney. He’s not so well known these days (I think the first time I ever heard his name was reporting at Bridport magistrates’ court in the mid-1990s, when somebody was up for stealing books from his [...]