Oxfordshire Artweeks Visual Arts Festival offers an annual feast of pictures & artefacts and an insight into the enormous variety of artists and artwork around the county. Chipping Norton and the surrounding villages are particularly rich in artists and in this year’s festival over 40 of them showed their work in and around the town. There were painters, potters and printmakers, photographers, jewellers, woodworkers, textile artists, sculptors and a glassmaker.

 

Here we profile some of the artists who exhibited in and around Chipping Norton.

Jan Harvey is an artist known primarily for her life-drawing work, however, for this Artweeks she produced a collection of landscapes featuring local farms. Recently Jan has also launched her limited edition prints business, Jan Harvey Prints.

Sophie Thompson creates sculptures from farmyard scrap metal. The animals and birds she makes are unique and have been sold worldwide. Recently, one of her full-sized horses was used in the film, Lady Godiva.

Barbara Prout is a painter – it’s the only thing she’s ever wanted to do. For her painting is an exploration – connecting inner and outer worlds and exploring relationships between colours, forms and textures. It’s not easy to describe in words, but if you like painting you’ll have an idea what she’s talking about.

Charlotte Douglass has a range of interests – over the years she has painted in watercolours and taken many photographs. Now she has become fascinated by glass. Not stained glass, but forms and shapes moulded in clear glass, so you can feel smooth and rough textures, and watch the play of the light through the glass and its bubbles.

Jill Colchester is based in Chadlington:

"For artweeks this year I have been working on an Artist-In-Residency (having lived in Chad for 24 years) project and drawn nearly the whole of Chadlington. A personal view but I am also hoping to produce an artist book emphasising the characteristics of Chadlington - the five ends. I am also exhibiting drawings of nudes."

In nearby Hook Norton three separate exhibitions were held in the village this year.

David McGill                                         David Turner                                                       RitaWheatley      

David McGill – photographs and greetings cards.

David Turner – sculptured ironwork pieces.

Rita Wheatley –  paintings and drawings.

You can read more about the artists on their own pages on this site from where you can contact the artists and reach their own websites.