BOTTOMS, balloons and car exhausts were all on display to art-lovers touring studios across the town.

Organisers behind Swindon Open Studios, which finished on Sunday, hailed the relaunched art festival a success.

Caroline Day, an Old Town painter and member of the open studios committee, said: “One of the successes this year was the fact that new artists – as well as established artists – through the town were each visited by 20-30 people, which is fantastic.”

Artists from Bishopstone to Cricklade and Highworth to Old Town threw open the doors to their studios. “It’s a fantastic opportunity for all artists and groups to come together,” said Caroline, who thanked designer Chris Waddell of Waddell Digital for his work in sponsoring and rebranding the festival and designing its website.

As well as the more traditional fine art, there was more unusual fare on offer at Swindon studios.

In Grange Park, 24-year-old Mia Willis showed her paintings of male bottoms. “It started off as a bit of a joke,” the former Reading University graduate said. One project had seen her sculpt a man’s torso out of lard, the figure’s back literally dripping onto his bottom.

She said: “I don’t know where the idea came from. It just happened. Being at university, the creativity is all there – and everyone is egging each other on. It spiralled.”

But when she started doing more research into the history of the male nude in art, she realised she could be on to an interesting theme: “It’s a very stylised form. It has been since Michelangelo’s David. Compare his sculpture to, say, pictures of David Beckham and the similarities between them are all there.

“I wanted to show studies of actual male bottoms. There’s such an ideal of the male form – as much as there is with the female body.”

At the Olive Tree Café, Cheney Manor, an art group from nearby TWIGS community garden, had hung exquisite hot air balloon sculptures. Lori Rogers, organiser of the therapy group, said of one black balloon: "It' says everything you can't always articulate about how people with poor mental health feel. There are two sides to the illness."

And in Wroughton, environmental artist John Maskalaniec’s Adam and Eve-inspired sculpture created from four interwoven and fire-spitting car exhausts showed the way global warming was destroying people’s paradise on earth.

Inspired by Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 68-year-old John said it hinted at society’s potential loss of earth’s paradise if people continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rate.

“I remember when I was 11 or 12-years-old sun bathing in the summer holidays. It would take all day to get a bit burned or tanned. This was back in the early 60s,” he said.

“Now, you can lie out there for half an hour and you’re burned. Nobody’s going to tell me there’s not a change in the climate.”

More than 50 artists were part of this year’s Swindon Open Studios. Organisers thanked sponsors Waddell Digital, Hills, Oink Gallery, Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, Interprint, Visit Swindon, The Brunel, John Lewis at Home and the Samaritans.

The art festival was raising money for the Samaritans, with cash from sales of paintings at John Lewis at Home expected to be totalled-up in the coming days.