FIVE-WAYS Art, the on-line agency promoting Welsh art and artists, returns to Monmouth with a vibrant new exhibition this week.

The show includes work by some of Wales’ most accomplished painters, sculptures and printmakers. Over twenty artists are represented in the exhibition, offering collectable works ranging in price from prints at £50 to grand landscape oil paintings for £2,500.

Vicky Penn, who set up Five-Ways Art from her home near Abergavenny in 2010, said: “I am trying to discover and showcase the best in contemporary Welsh art. Wales seems to have a wealth of artistic talent disproportionate to its size, yet artists here are often either overlooked or undervalued or both. I spend a lot of time visiting studios up and down the country, digging out talent that I can take pride in exhibiting.”

The 2016 exhibition is highly eclectic, including works of art ranging from wood engravings to paper mache sculpture. If there is a motif, however, it is the landscape. “It is hardly surprising,” Vicky Penn said. “The landscape is such an emotive subject in Wales.”

Often beautiful, frequently empty, elemental, refashioned by the changing seasons, refined by the weather and occasionally wild, the Welsh landscape is a force that all artists who live here have to reckon with at some point.

Local artist Lois Hopwood will be exhibiting her semi-abstract landscapes: “Even in a tiny painting I want to create the great sense of space, of our open skies and vast mountains,” Lois said.

Matt Wood, who has been painting the Brecon Beacons for many years, comments: “I never tire of the endless possibilities offered up by the landscape here. I like to paint in one sitting outdoors, trying to capture in a painterly way space, distance, a sense of place and atmosphere.”

Julienne Braham says of her enduringly popular work: “Perhaps my happiest moments are when I am drawing outdoors in the landscape, trying to capture a certain light, clouds in a particular formation, or even a bird that has by chance appeared in my field of vision.  Then I feel at one with nature, I feel part of the landscape”.

The exhibition runs in the Shire Hall from 13th October to 16th October

For more information visit www.five-ways.net