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Three established East Anglian artists will be holding a Summer Exhibition at the Clare Country Park over the August Bank Holiday weekend.

Darryl Nantais, Gary Theobald and Neil Gardner will be displaying works in the Park Rangers Centre from Friday, August 27, until Monday, August 30 inclusive, from 10am to 5pm daily.

The artists will be available to chat to and welcome visitors with complimentary refreshments.

Darryl Nantais was born in Cambridgeshire in 1955. As a child he began painting landscapes and at the age of 12 he moved to Norfolk where he was able to capture the beauty of the coast and its dramatic skies.

After leaving home Darryl settled in Norwich where he studied the past Norfolk Masters such as Chrome, Cotman and Bright. Instead of The Ouse, he painted thousands of pictures of The Broads and The Yare.

At the age of 18 he began to visit Paris, and eventually lived there for about a year and while in France he met and worked with the then eighty-year-old Eduard Palmare, an old colleague of Miro and Picasso.

Darryl was offered an opportunity to paint for a Parisian gallery but decided to return to England where he began teaching and working for an agency copying old master paintings.

On returning to Cambridgeshire in 1987, he founded The Peppin Brown Art Gallery in Whittlesford, which became renowned for its restoration and framing. More teaching followed and he was able to promote many East Anglian artists.

Gary Theobald has had no formal art training and it was not until his mid-thirties, when he decided to produce a chalk mural of Winnie the Pooh for his youngest daughters bedroom, that his life in art truly began.

As a medium, coloured pencils were a natural choice for Gary. Although he had never seen any coloured pencil art work to influence this decision, it just 'felt right' and after purchasing a set of 12 Derwent artist pencils he has rarely wavered from the delights that this vibrant and expressive medium brings.

Gary is a signature member of the UK Coloured Pencil Society, a member of the Suffolk Art Society and the Guild of Essex Craftsmen, and is also an accredited demonstrator for the Derwent Cumberland Pencil Company.

He has held a number of successful solo exhibitions including a show at the National Horse Racing Museum, Newmarket and The Darryl Nantais Gallery in Linton.

Neil Gardner has taught art and design in secondary schools in East Anglia, since he qualified in 1983 and has been head of art and design at his present school, St Bede’s Church Comprehensive, Cambridge, since 1987.

Neil has painted from an early age, but it was not until 1984 that he became a professional, exhibiting and selling his work in Britain and Europe.
Neil could be accused of not specialising in one specific discipline of either subject or medium used, however he feels that there is a world out there, full of interest and exciting things to paint and draw, although seascapes, landscapes and architecture tend to be themes that are perennial interests.

He is interested in the seven elements of art -line, colour, shape, etc - as well as other aspects such as composition and themes.

Neil primarily works with the medium of watercolour, finding that it has a range of technical possibilities and qualities invariably missing in other painting mediums. These range from the ability to create a myriad of subtle tonal changes and transparent layering, to a capacity to be bold and opaque when needed.