Oil painter Jenny Sutton is a Dorset girl, regularly revisiting the county. “My 96-year-old mother grew up in Wimborne and her father was HJ Evans, who was a well-known character in the town in the ‘20s and ‘30s,” says Jenny, who attended Parkstone Grammar School. “He owned the newsagents and booksellers in East Street and when cars first appeared in Wimborne he used to take pride in personally directing the traffic.”Jenny’s other grandparents ran the Coventry Arms at Corfe Mullen until the mid 1950s, where her father Ralph was brought up.
“I have happy memories of fishing in the River Stour at the bottom of the then beautiful garden behind the pub. One summer, when I was six, I came across a snake in the vegetable garden. It was an adder, and Grandad dispatched it quickly with a hatchet. It was then displayed outside the bar for all to see!”
Jenny, whose mum still lives in Wimborne, remembers summer holiday hikes with school friends across the 
Purbecks. “I always had a paintbox in my rucksack and usually ended up at the Bankes Arms at Studland for a ritual ginger beer! I also had a friend whose family lived on a converted lifeboat in Poole Harbour, and we would sometimes go to one of the islands to give the boat its annual airing. There we would picnic and swim, and of course out came the sketchbook!”
Jenny read Fine Art at Reading University, and then ran her own gallery in Hampshire. She now regularly exhibits her own oil paintings, most recently being selected for the Creative Coverage Exhibition at the New Forest Centre Gallery in Lyndhurst, which finishes on April 2. Jenny is a regular exhibitor in Hampshire Open Studios. She is an elected full member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists.
