Exploring Art Group at The Sherborne
The Exploring Art group had a day trip to Sherborne to see the Quentin Blake Exhibition at The Sherborne Art Gallery, home to the nationally significant Thornhill Mural and 'Loo of the Year 2026'.
Airborne over Sherborne
Quentin Blake’s drawings have always carried lift — lines that leap, figures mid-flight, stories that rise off the page. Airborne over Sherborne invites you into that feeling of flight and freedom with a vibrant new series of works made in 2025: birds, contraptions, and impossible inventions that somehow feel completely believable in Blake’s world.
100 Portraits
Created exclusively for The Sherborne, 100 Portraits offers a rare chance to meet Quentin Blake’s imagination now: vivid, warm, and unmistakably his. These are not “likenesses” of specific people, but encounters — characters discovered through drawing, where a tilt of the head, a glance, or a single line can spark an entire personality.
Members of the Exploring Art Group enjoyed a very pleasant day in Sherborne, Dorset visiting "The Sherborne", an Art Gallery which is located in a beautiful Georgian House. We travelled on the train from Honiton, then began our visit to The Sherborne with coffee in the restaurant, which was distinguished by a superb arched wooden roof, and award-winning toilets decorated in Japanese style. The House itself was worth a visit, but we had come to see two displays of work by Quentin Blake, best known as an illustrator of books, in particular those by Roald Dahl.
At 93 years old, Quentin Blake was commissioned to create some artworks for The Sherborne. One exhibit was a set of 100 portraits, drawn in graphite, of imaginary people. It looked as if he had drawn them without taking his pencil off the paper, creating the character and shading with one continuous line. The other exhibition was called "Airborne over Sherborne", and was instantly recognisable as Quentin Blake's work. Old ladies with wings flying back from a shopping trip towing their dog behind them, gentlemen perched on precarious-looking flying contraptions, all rendered in the scribbley, mischievous Blake style, yet somehow entirely believable. Looking at them we wondered whether we ourselves could fly if only we believed in it enough.
After lunch, some members of the party visited the Abbey, while others trawled the local shops. We were back home in Sidmouth by late afternoon.
Maureen
Click on an image below to start the slideshow
No photos of the Blake exhibition as photography is not allowed inside the building...although we did take a couple before we were informed (+ a few of the loos - Ladies by Judith J and Gents by Chris P, just in case you were wondering).
