SIGNATURE Gallery's latest exhibition Black and Blue is one of contrast.

Gallery owner Peter Blaskett has a knack of attracting exciting contemporary artists to his Kirkland-based art house in Kendal, often spotting impressive new talent, such as Daniel Cooper, Stefan Orlowski, and Paul Lawrence.

This time he's brought together two Lakeland artists at the top of their game - Monica Metsers, whose reputation is growing far and wide with her highly imaginative work off on a prestigious tour of China next year alongside pieces by David Hockney, Tracey Emin and Lucien Freud; and prolific talent, Tim Leeson, whose previous two Kendal exhibitions, Inside Outside at the Brewery Arts Centre and Beach Huts at Cafe Sola, were both well received.

Monica's prize-winning, highly constructed and controlled work is mesmerising and seductive, the layers of oil paint building to create an almost sculptural effect. She does big and bold brilliantly as Ballena Y Geisha in Black and Blue testifies, and what her smaller painting Reina Rata lacks in comparative size, the commanding, slightly disconcerting and fantastical figure within, makes it one of the show's standout paintings.

The exhibition also includes a few of Monica's excellent pencil drawings, including Sprint Mill Window.

Tim's 2015 Brewery exhibition Inside Outside focused on his love of 20th Century art and his interest in the work of Marcel Duchamp. It was a vivid and extremely expressive selection with some impressive work.

Here, however, the former Royal Engineer, who set up the South Lakes Arts Collective when he moved from Kendal to Ulverston in April, has gone one step farther. In Black and Blue, gone is the turbulence of previous pieces; optimism flows throughout in a vibrant and harmonious mix.

As an artist Tim really seems to have found himself and his Portal series of paintings for me is his best and most engaging and experimental work to date. His abstraction appears less chaotic and more measured, the tonal variations used with clever effect, particularly, Portal 5.

Although, a relatively small gallery, what Signature lacks in wall space it certainly makes up for in the quality of the art it shows.

Black and Blue runs at Signature until October 1.