Art business fights back

A Shropshire company has found a creative way of doing business despite Coronavirus restrictions.

Art gallery owner Jonathan Soden is one of the many business people in the county who have had to adapt their ways of working through the pandemic.

He has joined forces with a CGI (computer generated image) specialist to launch an innovative online gallery which is gaining widespread attention.

“The challenges that this year has thrown at us mean that we have had to find new and different methods of marketing our business,” said Jonathan, whose gallery on Wyle Cop houses one of the Midlands’ leading contemporary art collections.

“We approached, Mark Payne of Cambridge, whose incredible hyper realism paintings are regularly exhibited in the gallery. He also heads up a CGI business called Mission 3D and we worked together to create a new living gallery on our website that clients can ‘walk through’ from the comfort of their own homes.

“It uses the latest digital technology to give clients a very realistic experience, letting them feel that they are browsing through various rooms. It will be a changing space just like our Wyle Cop gallery, with different exhibitions and artwork being featured over time, and has been very well received so far.”

Jonathan said that since he asked Mission 3D to create the digital gallery other top companies, including one of the world’s leading watch manufacturers, had commissioned similar projects.

Pictured: Jonathan Soden, proprietor of the Soden Collection, with his online gallery on screen