A growing number of artists opened their doors as part of last year’s Artists’ Open House Scheme 2009. We were thrilled to bits to count both new and familiar faces among the talented artists who took part, inviting you into their homes and studios, and plans are now underway for this year’s event which will include an exhibition by our artists at the Alma Road Social Club. Watch this space for further news.

Meanwhile, take a look at some of the artist from last year’s Artists’ Open House Scheme.

Elizabeth Herkstroter
Born and raised in the Netherlands, Elizabeth Herkstroter decided to become a sculptor after a visit to the Musee Rodin in Paris in her teens. During her further education at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Design at the Academy Minerva in Groningen, Holland, she worked mainly with clay and wax/bronze and also made frequent visits to Carrara in Italy, where she worked with marble and in foundries.
Elizabeth now works with marble, Portland sandstone and slate. She has lived in England since 1990 and her work has been shown at the Mall Galleries, the Royal Academy (Summer Exhibition), the Gallery Kohler in London and, since 2000, her work has been permanently on show in The Garden Gallery in Broughton, Hampshire.
“I love the timelessness of stone,” she says. “It has such an ancient feel. It can be stubborn but I love the laborious work that goes with it.”
The beauty, balance and sense of proportion to be found in Nature are Elizabeth’s inspiration.

Yvonne Bilshausen
www.couturerocks.com
Nearly 10 years ago Yvonne Bilshausen began creating unique statement jewellery from semi-precious stones, and recreating heirloom jewellery into modern works of art.
Couture Rocks evolved from her love of architecture, Nature and fashion, and during the Windsor Fringe’s Artists’ Open House she will have dozens of signature necklaces, earrings and bracelets on display as well as a gallery of past work and raw materials available for bespoke commissions.

Cynthia Barlow Marrs
www.cbarlowmarrs.com
After living and working in six countries as a landscape architect and environmental planner, Cynthia Barlow Marrs has returned to her art and design roots and is now a full-time artist based in Windsor.
She uses colour and line to evoke impressions of the extraordinary landscapes she has encountered throughout her travels and in May this year was elected an Associate Member of the Society of Graphic Fine Art (www.sgfa.org.uk).
She exhibits regularly in both solo and group shows, as well as online at: www.artistsandillustrators.co.uk and www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk and also accepts commissions.
Building work at her Windsor home has meant that Cynthia has had to adapt to working without a dedicated space over the past year, resulting in smaller works and new techniques, and at least one linocut and one woodblock print will appear alongside new drawings and collages on both paper and canvas during the Windsor Fringe, after which she will be exhibiting at the Society of Graphic Fine Art’s 88th Annual Exhibition from October 5-10 at The Meniere Chocolate Factory Gallery in London and the Windsor Contemporary Art Fair at the Royal Windsor Racecourse from November 13-15.

Jonathan Greenyer
Jonathan Greenyer is a freelance business consultant, a soon to be published author and lifelong artist who lives in the idyllic semi-rural village of Woodside, near Ascot, a village blessed, he says, with the fabled Duke of Edinburgh public house.

Jonathan took to painting and drawing seriously 10 years ago and has taken himself on a journey of discovery and exploration of art techniques and styles. Testing the limits of acrylic paints, inks and pastels with some unusual and often very messy pre- and post-production techniques on his painting, he has a wide oeuvre of material, from portraits to colour explorations. He has been described as a colourist – but that descriptor in the wrong hands can be a synonym for a rank amateur dauber, he says. “I consider myself a self exploring abstract expressionist with representational tendencies and a love of long words (hence the book).”

He has undertaken many commissions and portraits, and would be pleased to send a disc of his paintings to any interested parties, take part in exhibitions and read extracts from his next book.

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Duncan Bell
www.duncanbellsculpture.com

Duncan Bell retired early from business in 2001 and now spends most of his time carving stone. A member of the Surry Sculpture Society, he was introduced to stone carving at sculpture classes at the Art Academy in London during 2003 and 2004, and has worked with Zimbabwean sculptors. In 2004 he worked for leading stone carver Emily Young, preparing pieces for her St Pancras Crypt exhibition.

Dun, who will have at least 30 pieces on show during the Fringe, can says his inspiration comes largely from the stone, which he usually selects and procures from a number of quarries. He likes to work with stone with a high fossil content and says that it is only when the polishing process begins that you can start to see the final colours. He works in a variety of textures, from highly polished surfaces to roughly worked stone and has limited edition foundry casts in bronze and aluminium from a number of his carvings.

Ann Trewartha

Ann Trewartha is a clothing designer whose heavily textured paintings on silk began after a visit to a Chinese silk painting factory in Hong Kong where she was working 22 years ago. She brought home two yards of silk, started practising and was addicted! She uses the hand-painted silk for clothes such as kimonos and T-shirts, but when she went to live in Crete in 1994 she started painting everything around her, such as icons, buildings and flowers, and became influenced by the frescoes in Byzantine churches, and the colours of the earth and rocks.

Back home in Windsor she was asked to paint silk panels, stretched on boards, for The Glasshouse clothes shop in Windsor as part of their corporate image - which is very heavily metallic, pewter, silver and silver leaf on shades of grey - and her paintings are now in their shops in Guildford, Brighton, Oxford, Marlow and Chiswick.

This will be Ann’s third year in the Fringe’s Artists at Home and she says: “It is such a pleasure meeting so many different people interested in art.”