PASTORAL themes, from leaping hares to a shepherd holding a lamb at the end of winter, have helped establish etchings and watercolours artist Anna Ravenscroft's reputation.

She returns to Ludlow's Silk Top Hat Gallery on September 11 with a portfolio that sums up her great love of nature.

Anna explains: "My work is based on intense drawings that I do in order to understand and know my subject matter.

" From this I feel free to develop my themes into larger pieces of work.

"I spend time watching, listening and very particularly sensing that atmosphere and just what that particular atmosphere means to me."

She was born close to a mountain in Scotland. After she trained as an artist, she returned to remote, mountainous areas.

"At this time my heaven was well defined as wilderness and mountains," she says. " In order to move about and gain greater freedom, possessions had to be lost and paintings had to be smaller. Places that formed my studio ranged from empty houses and barns, spare rooms in friends' houses to the back of my long-suffering Land Rover." Anna is also a photographer and has completed the images for a book on calligraphy.

As an art group leader, she has been to Crete and the Lofoten Islands in Norway. Her latest exhibition continues until September 25.