THE new art exhibition has its private view on Saturday night at Tenby Museum and Art Gallery. Cherry Pickles: Wales and Beyond is a show that challenges the viewer, demanding our attention without telling us what to think.

The exhibition will feature works of self-portraiture and landscapes, but not in a way that is often represented by artists.

There will be self-portraits with the artist in a defiantly alcoholic pose of Dylan Thomas wearing a green tweed jacket and a red bra, and also as a half-naked 'Last Bard' smoking a cigarette and with a plastic gun stuffed into her jeans.

Cherry finds the attraction of such challenging depictions of the self in the fact that she is both artist and model, relating her vision through the reverse images in the mirror where the making of each brush stroke necessarily disrupts the model's pose.

In such works, she is associating herself with the self-destruction of the male poets, illustrating the obsessions, displaying her sexuality and in the process making herself look ridiculous. Here the attention is demanded, but the explanations oblique.

Painting landscapes in the driving seat of a car is also an enjoyable complex process.

It is the characteristic view many of us get of the landscape, but whereas most landscapes do very little with the foreground, Cherry's works depict the steering wheel, the coffee cup or sandwich, the wipers and rain smears on the windows, placing the viewer precisely in the visually rich but often ignored view seen from the driving seat.

Cherry lives and works in Pembrokeshire and beyond. She trained at Chelsea Art School and at the Slade School of Art.

In recent years, she has painted in Pembrokeshire, Greece, the United States, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

The sales exhibition will be officially opened by Solva-based artist Raul Speek tomorrow (Saturday) night and will be open to the public from Sunday.