GROUP exhibitions are always exciting propostions because of the varied amount of artwork on show.

And the latest to come to my attention is a real cracker.

Lines of Thought features seven artists, all who use sketchbooks as a starting point to be creative, but with very different aims.

The exhibition runs at Kendal’s Brewery Arts Centre until May 4, gracing the walls of its upstairs Sugar Store Gallery, which is one of the art best spaces in town.

Ann Marie Foster, Barbara Cropper, Frances Winder, Mary Holden, Karen Lloyd, Shelley Rhodes and Pauline Lawton, team up for what’s a fascinating and engaging show.

And each artist has a mix of sketches and final pieces on show.

For the past year Karen Lloyd has been developing new paintings mostly based on Kendal Fell, going out nearly every day armed with a small sketchbook and a camera to record what she sees. Karen also has a few charcoal drawings included in the exhibition.

Printmaker and painter Barbra (correct spelling) Cropper was born in the Fylde and lived for nine years in Africa.

Her copper plate etchings and monoprints express her enjoyment of line and colour, inspired by sketches created on her travels.

Embroidery is the forte of Shelley Rhodes, who worked as a designer in the television industry, before re-training to become an art teacher.

For many years she has kept a visual diary in which to observe and record everyday objects, scenes and events. Some pages, she says, are representational, whereas some are abstract, perhaps trying to capture a colour, texture, line, pattern or emotion.

The work on show from Ann Marie Foster is inspired by a collaboration with biologists at the Lancaster Environment Centre, at Lancaster University, which gave the Kendal-based printmaker access to the centre’s laser imaging facility. The series of drawings that Ann Marie has included in the exhibition reveal the foundation of the work, and how thoughts, feelings and ideas manifest themselves through the experience of drawing.

When embroiderer Mary Holden makes a sketch for use as a design source she does it as quickly as possible and in ink: “This forces me to concentrate on the essence of the subject and prevents me from changing things,” she informed me: “What goes down has to stay there.”

Painter Frances Winder uses photography as well as sketching to collect information, either for fleeting colour such as the passing light on a hillside, glittering water, or maybe for a record of colour detail.

Pauline Lawton is also a painter, and has always been excited by colour, textiles and faded distressed surfaces, particularly old doors and crumbling flaking walls. Her travels have taken her to Morocco, Egypt, Jordan and desert areas, where she has been absorbed and influenced by some of those cultures and their changing use of patterns and shapes. Although the majority of her work is about the landscape sometimes it reveals itself in a semi-abstract way.

An exhibition well-worth seeing.