IT’S a full circle turnaround for an IT consultant who officially opened the doors to his new art gallery last weekend.

Jonathan Watson and his wife, Caroline, opened Suite 307 on Leigh’s London Road, after some creative thinking with regards to the shopfront of Jonathan’s IT consultant office.

He explains: “I kind of stumbled into IT after being at art school,.

“It was a bit of an accident really. I was deciding whether I was going to go to university and carry on studying art and I was trying to find a job in graphics.

“I ended up working for a bank and I’ve never looked back – until now.”

The new gallery will feature a coffee bar as well as the exhibition space, so people can pop in for a takeaway coffee and absorb a bit of art while they wait.

It opens with an exhibition, featuring a mix of artists. It will be an eclectic collection, with offerings from established landscape artist Jonathan Trim to Karen Christensen’s whimsical contemporary creations and works by Brazilian-born painter and ceramic artist Sandra Wray.

Manfred Hennessy will be showcasing some of his dreamy, surreal illustrations and wood carvings, Alan Griffiths, who’s recently exhibited in London and Geneva, will be displaying work from his New Form of Beauty collection, wildlife artists Joel Kirk and Howard Parfitt will also have work on display and Simon Hollands will be exhibiting travel posters and anti-guides made with collaged found images.

There will also be special work from Arizona artist Pieter Schaafsma, who will be exhibiting a selection of his stone balancing photographs, which involve placing combinations of rock or stone in arrangements which require immense patience and sensitivity to generate. His involvement in the exhibition came about through Leigh artist Simon Kirk, who is also exhibiting at Suite 307.

He found success when he was invited to exhibit work at Gallery 113 in Flagstaff, Arizona, and become friends with Pieter.

Simon explains: “I had a lot of press coverage. It caught the public’s attention, so I thought it would bring a nice symmetry to the story if an American artist exhibited here in Leigh.

Jonathan is looking forward to seeing the responses to the mixed work. He says: “We’re going to keep changing the exhibitions. We’re not going to constantly have the same people in there. Hopefully, it’ll just keep people coming back.”