Art Fair

The Reading Modern Art fair is underway in its seventh year with a full host of artistic varieties at the Rivermead Leisure Centre. The fair was established in 2010 as a counterpart to one in Windsor and has been attracting increasing numbers of culture-hungry punters ever since. This year one hundred thirty artists, print manufacturers, photographers, sculptors and ceramicists from the United Kingdom and Europe have filled the Centre with their work and an ethos of 'real art for real people'. One such artist is Reading born and bred Mark Andrew Webber, whose still-life pencil drawings sit alongside massive, text dominated items.

The works are a study in typography and geography, with street and place names collected by Mark as he wanders around cities and then carves them into linoleum. "I travel around cities collecting typography," Mark explained on Saturday morning. "My most up-to-date one is of Berlin. I used to be there for 2 months walking the town, twelve hours every day with a camera. "Then I came back and did some additional analysis, which took a year, and then carved for 5 months.

Another artist who has come to the fair for the fifth consecutive year is Tom Cartmill, who has been shaping an increasingly flourishing career for himself over the past twenty-five years. "Last year I was using paper almost as a 3D object, scrumpling it and using it as a material," explained the fifty-one year-old, who works a sheeps' bleating distance from the known lambing pens of Amners Farm. "Over the past year my work has become more and more simplified. "I notice one line and then repeat it, putting one level on top of another to form what appears to be 3 dimensional." Modern Paintings