The Waterside Open, Sale, Manchester, UK.

Thursday was a fine St David’s Day and was truely like spring had sprung with sunshine and blue skies to start the month with a smile.  I took a walk along the canal and came across a great exhibition at the Waterside Arts Centre in Sale, Manchester, that runs until the 21st April.  The exhibition features a wonderfully diverse range of art forms and creative practice.  Disciplines include photography, painting, printing, textiles, ceramics, sculpture and film.  Here’s a selection of some of the pieces I enjoyed.

I loved the colours in the ‘Valley in Winter’ painting, here it is in close up.

A lovely arrangement of butterflies by ceramist Sarah Malone.

I also thought the waterfall and birds had great movement and the shadows behind the birds added another dimension to the hanging.

Personally the most appealing was Anthony Ogden’s ‘The Girl in Hyacinth Blue’ (above) for both it’s nod towards the work of Vermeer and for it’s fine depiction of the reflective tankard and the bowl of fruit, something of a a painterly snapshot.  First prize went to ‘Beware of the Dog’, with Elvis Costello coming in third.

This shows you what the queues were like to get into the exhibition and also how blue the sky really was. Well worth a visit if you’re in the area.