By Mary Bamber and Jean Jones:

"The art club has been meeting in the Health Living Centre in Ystradgynlais since April 2004. We'd been meeting together before that but as a class rather than a club, with a weekly tutor from Brecon. However in 2003, the tutor decided to give up her Ystradgynlais class.

We were quite a cohesive group, we all got along well and so we decided to stay together and form our own art club. The club now meets every Thursday morning between 10am - 1.00pm with only a short break for Christmas and summer. It costs £1.50 a session but we've also had a grant from Communities First.

We don't have a tutor as such - we're more of a self-help group - but we do invite artists in to hold workshops on particular topics. These workshops are held about once a month and they tend to be all day events, running from 10.00am - 4.00pm.

People here depend on the club in more ways than one. If you live on your own and you're feeling a little down, coming here can be a real tonic. It's like coming to a social club - we have a lot of fun together.

We're all amateurs, ranging from absolute beginners to almost professionals. We have some really talented members who go around and help others. What's nice about the way we work is that we don't have to do a still life this week, for example, as we would if we had a tutor. We got a lot from the tutor but we are using that training now to do our own thing.

It's a club not a class so we're encouraged by others, our expectations are different, we're all doing our own thing, working at our own pace and taking our time. But we are improving all the time. You only have to look at examples of members work to see there's been a vast improvement in standards over time.

One of the main purposes of the club is that we want art to reach as many people as possible. We exhibit once a year at the local library but we also have other exhibitions at the local hospital and at a local pub.

We're both selling paintings too and it's nice to know that strangers who don't know us like our work - it's a real boost and more important than the money.

The class is open to anyone although it's made up mainly but not exclusively of pensioners. At the moment, we have 25 members but we have a waiting list of people wanting to join - there's more demand than space!"