The Reading Contemporary Art Fair is underway in its seventh year with a whole host of creative types at the Rivermead Leisure Centre.

The fair was set up in 2010 as a counterpart to one in Windsor and has been attracting increasing numbers of culture-hungry punters ever since.

This year 130 artists, print makers, photographers, sculptors and ceramicists from the UK and Europe have filled the Centre with their work and an ethos of 'real art for real people'

One such artist is Reading born and bred Mark Andrew Webber, whose still-life pencil drawings sit alongside large, text dominated pieces.

The works are a study in typography and geography, with street and place names collected by Mark as he wanders around cities and then carves them into linoleum.

"I travel around cities collecting typography," Mark explained on Saturday morning.

"My most recent one is of Berlin. I was there for two months walking the city, 12 hours a day with a camera.

"Then I came back and did some more research, which took a year, and then carved for five months.

"I hope to travel to travel to Tokyo in a year or two once I have saved up and learnt some of the language."

Reading Chronicle:

Day dreaming 2 - Mark Andrew Webber

Another artist who has returned to the Fair for the fifth consecutive year is Tom Cartmill, who has been forging an increasingly successful career for himself over the past 25 years.

"Last year I was using paper almost as a 3D object, scrumpling it and using it as a material," explained the 51 year-old, who works a sheeps' bleating distance from the famous lambing pens of Amners Farm.

"Over the past year my work has become increasingly simplified.

"I find one line and then repeat it, putting one level on top of another to create what seems to be three dimensional."

Through this new method simple black and white ink drawings begin to bulge and push out of the paper as abstract waves twist and contour across the surface. It is an arresting effect, and one that has won the Swainestone Road resident serious plaudits.

Reading Chronicle:

Ripple (Ink on paper) - Tom Cartmill

As well as a space in the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, Cartmill was selected from 5,000 artists for the Derwent Art Prize and has received invitations to exhibit at the 164 RWA Open and the Brighton Art Fair.

The Reading Contemporary Art Fair runs today and tomorrow at the Rivermead Leisure Centre.