Penny Timmis is showing her new collection of paintings at the White Lion Street Gallery in Tenby.

With family living in Manorbier, Penny is a frequent visitor to Pembrokeshire, enabling her to travel the area and build up her stock of images, memories and experiences of the county.

Many of her paintings are started outside in the open, as immediate responses to the view of coastline, landscape or sea she encounters. Affected by wind and weather, she captures her first impressions.

She chooses not to record in an exact photographic sense, responding more to the colour, movement and pattern of what she sees.

Back in her studio, the roof space of a converted chapel on the Welsh borders, surrounded by her sketches, papers, pots of paint and water, she recreates the spontaneity of her initial drawings. Working with crayons, watercolour, acrylic paint and ink she layers the mediums, often adding an unexpected flourish of line and colour, or the addition of collage.

In her exhibition, she shows land and coastlines of Pembrokeshire, her native Shropshire and glimpses of her 'other' life as a dairy farmer with paintings of boisterous heifers and imperious poultry.

Penny was born in 1956, studied art at the Froebel Institute in London and briefly in Shrewsbury before moving to Shropshire.

Widowed with four children and a farm to run, the likelihood of developing a painting career seemed unlikely, but Penny juggled her roles, sharing some of her farming duties with a neighbouring farmer, and started to paint seriously nine years ago.

Her paintings were first showed in Tenby at Art Matters in 2004, since when she has become a regular exhibitor in prestigious galleries across the UK and at the Affordable Art Fairs. She has been elected as an associate of both the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and the Society of Women Artists with annual shows in the Mall Galleries in London. This will be her third solo exhibition in this gallery in Tenby.

The exhibition runs until June 28 at the White Lion Street Gallery in Tenby. Everyone is invited to meet the artist at the official opening tomorrow (Saturday) between 2 and 4 pm. The gallery is open from 10 am to 5 pm daily (closed on Wednesdays).

The entire exhibition can be viewed on the website http://www.artmatters.org.uk">www.artmatters.org.uk and further information is available by 'phone at (01834) 843375.