Your guide: Over 100 artists will display their work at 27 art spaces near Banbury for Artweeks festival

Oxfordshire Artweeks, the UK’s oldest and biggest open studios and pop-up exhibition event, takes place across the county this month, and this year the festival is all set to be brighter and bolder than ever before.

In Banbury and the surrounding villages, more than 100 artists and makers –painters, photographers, potters, sculptors, jewellers, textile artists and more – in twenty local venues are throwing open their doors to welcome visitors, for free, into their open studios and pop-up exhibitions from May 4 until May 12.

Visitors will be able to enjoy the visual arts in a relaxed and friendly way, to see, touch and talk about hundreds of thousands of pieces of art and craft in many different styles, and to meet artists, designers and makers and to see them in action. Some artists team up to host group shows while others open their studios and welcome visitors both to enjoy their work and to chat about their materials and methods. At most venues you can meet the artist and at many there are a variety of demonstrations.

Start perhaps at Church Lane Gallery, the home of Banbury Artists’ Co-operative, which as extended opening hours for Artweeks, or The Mill where mixed-media artist Asha Pearse, also known as Mala of Hearts, is exhibiting intuitive emotive art informed by spirituality and universal connection.

Full of hearts, her tactile paintings, in deep pinks, blues and rich turquoise, are powerful and energetic, and yet meditative. “I often work with the number 108 which appears within Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism as a significant number,” she explains. “It appears in many forms with these spiritual and religious disciplines: from 108 beads in a string of Mala beads, to 108 mantras chanted, 108 steps in a temple to the number of snails upon the Buddhas head. Many of my pieces feature this number or a derision of 108. I also use hearts as the heart is a universal symbol, the simplest expression of love in all its forms.”

In Banbury, you can also visit Artweeks first-timer Helen McCarthy who invited you to visit her garden studio to see a wide variety of art from figurative paintings, portraiture and still life (including skulls), to landscapes and striking abstract work, inspired by life drawings and the human form.

Another Artweeks newcomer, Shire Bramble, is presenting a pop-up gallery in a stable in a stunning setting across the moat from the crenelations of Broughton Castle. She delights in the solitude of wild places and the balance of nature and her love of simple country walks and the magic they conjure is clear in her paintings. Her collection is inspired by journeys and their possibilities, cottages in rambling lanes and hedgerows - winding down from the Cotswolds to the New Forest and the coast.

For local landscapes and wildlife too, in Milcombe, photographer Cliff Kinch is presenting his recent work in a pop-up gallery, including new macro close-up work, and Artweeks is a chance to explore the nearby studio of wildlife artist Ronny Loxton.

Beyond, in Adderbury, visitors can stroll between three venues including Beehive Cottage on the High Street behind which John Collier is opening his stone-built studio in which he is showing paintings and drawings including a series inspired by Allie Asiri’s A poem for every day of the year.

In Groom’s Lodge, visitors can be wowed by stained glass panels, handmade jewellery and vivid paintings by Neil Butterfield who is known for his structured use of strong colours in which the patterning and composition are critical.

Exhibiting stylised acrylics of landscapes, the table, and other interiors, he sees the painting process as a way of shaping the world and his flat, almost decorative style explores the tension between the painted surface and the illusion of pictorial space.

Neil’s art heroes include David Hockney, Ben Nicholson and Matisse and above all Paul Klee. “For Klee it was a visit to Tunisia that did it: afterwards he said ’I have found colour’ it has hold of me”.

Neil remarks, “and for me, it was India and Rajasthan in particular. There they used colour in ways that seemed extraordinary and combinations that you wouldn’t normally expect to work such as a lemon yellow and a very bright pink.

Yet they are brilliant together and I learnt that if you occasionally step outside the classically understood system of complementary colours there are endless wonderful possibilities.’ Interestingly, and unusually for an artist whom you might expect to carry a sketchpad and paintbrush, Neil carries just a pencil and a memobook with him and writes down the colour palettes he sees in prose descriptions.

Nearby, Adderbury Church is hosting 17 artists and a diverse range of art that serves, perhaps, as a microcosm of the whole Artweeks festival. Here you can see work by artist and stone-carver Louise

Regan who is inspired by medieval art – including knotwork – and the buildings we see around us every day.

“I am fascinated by architecture.” She says. “It’s a living art that’s right in front of us and yet we often don’t notice it. If you walk down any High Street there’s always so much to see – just look up from the shop fronts and you’re sure to see something beautiful.

Louise’s series of ‘architectural studies’ show London, Oxford, Venice, Stratford-upon-Avon and, closer to home, Banbury and Adderbury. In these she takes buildings and architectural elements of a place and creates a montage, crowd-sourcing images and ideas on social media to ensure she includes the best and most popular details. Put together her compositions are a beautiful representation of the town or city, and also tell its story: whilst simply recording the splendid buildings in the town, they’ll make you look at Banbury with fresh eyes.

Over in King’s Sutton, there is another great village art trail with four venues within 500m, including a jewellery studio and a printmaking studio. At its heart, in the village church eight women artists are displaying an explorations of the sensations and colours in the landscape, inventive 3D creations inspired by theatre, circus and mythical stories, exquisite depictions of birds in fabric, paint and stitching and unusual bird pots in bright colours.

There’s a whole range of ceramics in nearby Fired-Up Studios where potter Helen Ward has invited nine of her student potters to exhibit their work with her. Keep your eyes peeled for her “Charlie’s donuts”, a fun collection of donuts with legs that pay homage to Charlie’s Angels, and other surprises amongst bowls, jugs, lampstands and seedheads for the garden.

For something else unexpected, head to Middleton Cheney where, alongside her popular contemporary animal paintings and prints, artist Melanie Charles is presenting a new range of

‘Discoballs for your walls’, glitter balls which, painted in colourful paints on flat board, look spherical and sparkle as if they have been created with mirror tiles.

Further afield, the new Iron Down Sculpture Studios near Deddington is a new venue that’s home to seven very different sculptors creating imaginative, inventive and whimsical sculpture from a variety of materials including clay, wood and metal.

To see further information on these artists, and other artists in Middleton Cheney, Cropredy and Williamscot, Swalcliffe and Sibford Ferris, Sibford Gower and beyond, visit www.artweeks.org