New paintings tell a story of change – as Stephen comes back to City URC
A NEW ART exhibition by Revd Stephen Best will be doing the rounds in the autumn and will reach City URC at the end of November, happily the same weekend that Stephen, newly retired from his many changing years of Synod duties, will be received back into membership at City Church.
Stephen said the exhibition, called Challenge, Choice & Change, tells the story of his journey through the Covid pandemic years to his final role as chaplain to the Synod Support Team, and moving into retirement. There are some 50 new paintings plus a few older ones, and Stephen has prepared an exhibition leaflet.
Main viewing day will be Saturday 30 November from 10.30am to 4.00pm, but the paintings will remain in place for the Sunday, so they can
be viewed after morning service on Sunday 1 December.
This is the first time for five years that Stephen has had time in his busy life to put an exhibition together. As he explains in the leaflet,
Challenge, Choice and Change were all part of the years between. During the Covid problems, he became the primary carer for his ailing mother who died last year, then thoughts of retirement began to loom.
He said his artistic expression became jumbled and diverse – though always therapeutic, and the exhibition includes elements of ‘honest
confusion, longing, frustration, set alongside swathes of bright, joyous colour, swirls of wishful optimism, and daubs of relief’. He found
abstraction was a natural way to work through so many feelings and such emotional complexity.
Stephen now looks ahead to enjoying a greater freedom to paint. For art to be meaningful, he says, it must be relational – it must speak to the
person looking at it. And, if anyone in City Church is interested, intrigued or puzzled by any of his paintings, he is happy to have a chat about them.

• The exhibition will open in St David’s Uniting Church in Trefforest in mid-November and go on from City URC to other Cardiff churches