AMA: association of midland artists

Art in the Park 2026
Since the AMA decided that we should have a presence at the annual Art in the Park festival we have chosen to avoid the logistical problems and expense involved in setting up a show of members’ work and instead invited visitors to present themselves with their children to have hand drawn portraits made by us as lasting memories of their visit. Doing this in previous years has made money for AMA as well as various charities and has appeared to be popular with the visiting public. This year Carey Moon, Carol Hogg and I decided to divide the drawing work between the three of us over the two days. Carey and I with great help from Brian O’Grady and Steve Draper fitted out the AMA tent on the Friday afternoon and left our site ready to begin drawing on Saturday morning.

Early evening I received a phone call to tell me that our tent had become loose and had become a danger to the adjacent tent which contained ‘’very valuable items of ceramic ware’’. I drove to the Jephson Gardens to fix the problem; on the way there I asked Jean Ensall to help with the expected repair and together we set out with that in mind. On finding plot 67, it was clear that one of the tent ‘legs’ had lifted from its socket and needed to be re-located and the guy ropes tensioned. However it was then that we encountered a ‘ jobsworth’ in a high viz singlet who told us that the tent would need to be dismantled overnight and re-erected in the morning and furthermore, the same applied for Saturday night!—this so that the valuable pottery should not be endangered?

When Saturday morning came, we had the help of Jean Ensall and one very helpful event attendant and were able to erect the tent without too much drama. Sitting in our tent, my Art in the Park experience then followed the usual Saturday morning pattern with the dog walkers passing by followed by the babies in their push chairs. Nothing changes.

By mid morning Carol Hogg had joined Carey Moon and they had begun to attract a queue of visitors wanting drawings of themselves and their children. Once visitors have started to show interest, our display usually attracts steady interest and Saturday afternoon saw a steady stream of parents and children lining up for drawings. David Hockney said that he much preferred to draw those that he knew well because there was not the necessity to ‘search’ for a likeness. For me, each new subject presents the same question, ‘will this one be the individual whose image I cannot ‘find’, will I finish with a nondescript child that parents could never own or some adult whose partner edits to the refuse? The highlight for the day was Mike and Dee Luntley presenting us with ice cold drinks, (mine contained gin), just the right ‘pick me up’ for the rest of the afternoon.

Sunday proved to be very similar with a continuous train of really interesting subjects that made the work a genuinely enjoyable experience. There were some that I would have liked to have spent thirty minutes in drawing instead of the ten/fifteen that I usually aim for. In the end, our target is to cover our expenses and make a little money for AMA and our charity, even when the drawing is saying that there is, ‘ more work to do here’. Towards the end of the show, AMA member Lynn Guyver came to assist with the organising of our visitors and help with dismantling and packing of our kit, all of which went into Carey’s tiny car!
For the most part A in P 2026 was an experience that I enjoyed, particularly so as we again covered expenses and made a small profit for AMA. For me it again demonstrates that a section of the public responds to the hand drawn portrait and is not just content to rely on the phone in their pocket.
John Hunt AMA

Surrealism and Freud in the Observer
I was given this book as a birthday present and asked for an opinion. This book, though ostensibly about Alice B. Toklas, who was Gertrude Stein’s long-term partner, is really about Gertrude Stein herself. It is written in her own particular style which pre-dates post modernism and the likes of Virginia Wolf, James Joyce and e.e. cummings but is a way of writing that eschews punctuation and uses capital letters according to her own particular convention.
Gertrude Stein strides through the first thirty years of the twentieth century with a careless insouciance that only someone of substantial economic means could effect. She meets a string of the famous nearly famous and now forgotten personalities who she either likes, dislikes, chooses to ignore or makes firm friends. The intellectual middle class of the time form a moving backdrop to the narrative. These individuals, both the men and the women, are usually tall, slim, handsome and possessing of an engaging sense of humour; they are usually artists, poets or writers. The book is well known for the name dropping of those artists who helped to shape the early years of the 20th. century. Picasso, Matisse, Braque and many others visit her in her Paris home although there is not much in the way of insight into their individual creative methods or intentions. Marie Laurencin gets a bad press and Fernande Oliver’s interest appears to extend no further than hats and dogs. Virtually no one who is anyone fails to appear, at one point I was wondering why Bertrand Russell had not made a visit and two pages on he did arrive and was argumentative! At times the narrative reads like a European travelogue with parts of the United States thrown in. Her friends buy property on a whim. The story covers the period during the Great War. Stein orders a Ford motor car from America and makes herself useful by driving around France and helping with the American fund for French wounded. She appears to spend time around Verdun without there being any mention of the terrible battle that cost so many lives. At one stage she and her friends decide to go to Palma to ‘’forget the war a little’’. The ongoing leit-motif of this book is Stein’s efforts to get her book, ‘’The Making of Americans’’ published and after many disappointments this does eventually happen. Hemingway and Fitzgerald arrive on the scene. Of Hemingway she says that he looks like a modern and he smells of museums. Stein states perceptively of Fitzgerald that he will be read when many of his well-known contemporaries are forgotten. The latter part of the book is set between 1919 and 1932 and generally follows a similar format to the earlier sections. What I found strange was that there is no mention of this time in the century that became known as the ‘’jazz age’’. Although mainly centred in the United States, there was a considerable cross over to European culture. The Dada movement and the Weimar republic do not feature in the world of Gertrude Stein which remains hermetically sealed within her particular coterie of friends and acquaintances. At the end, I had the feeling that I had received a great deal of information, largely anecdotal in content but not much of it of any substance. However, this book is an important record of its time, and a memoir of a life well lived, amongst extraordinary people and during an era of momentous change in Paris and Europe as a whole. Her book records details of the life of Gertrude and Alice and how the world impinged on their lives in various ways, and yet, Gertrude always managed to carry on being Gertrude and carry on doing her writing, no matter what.
John Hunt. AMA.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933

Surrealism and Freud in the Observer
The short talk on the origin and outcomes of Surrealism that I gave to the AMA members in July, was intended as a follow on to the talk on the DADA movement given by Carey Moon in February. The two movements were closely linked as many artists were associated with both movements.

Shortly after giving the talk on Surrealism I was presented with a review from the Observer newspaper of a new translation of Sigmund Freud’s ‘’Key Work’’, The Interpretation of Dreams by South African scholar, renowned psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist, Mark Solms. The review by Vanessa Thorpe is illustrated with a reproduction of a painting by Salvador Dali and a photograph of Freud. The new version of the psychoanalyst’s work by Solms aims to correct certain interpretations and misconceptions that have been deduced by readers from the intentions of the original work. Apparently the sexual constituent of dreams has been misinterpreted. After a general outline of Solms’s ideas as formulated in his new work the article then turns to the surrealist artists and claims that they also took their own narrow interpretation of Freud’s writings. Solms suggests that Freud was a conservative man who did not share the surrealist’s subversive aims. It also claims that Freud’s theories on the, ‘’Struggle for emotional freedom’’ sparked the birth of Surrealism and inspired the work of Dali, di Chirico, Magritte and the writings of Andre Breton. My own admittedly brief research into di Chirico pointed to influence from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Magritte and Breton, did not show up with any specific links to the influence of Freud’s writings nor is there anything to suggest that his theories about sexual urges and the meaning of dreams, ‘’sparked the birth of the movement’’ as the article tends to imply. The turmoil produced by the 1914/18 war that produced the DADA movement and its rejection of accepted values in art had, it could be argued, had far more influence on creative developments in the visual arts at the beginnings of the 20th Century as did ideas formed in Paris by George Braque and Pablo Picasso and their inventiveness in moving on from the work of the impressionist painters. These were far more effective in setting the scene for the burst of creative freedom that encompassed the European Art Movements. Although the surrealists were very interested in Freud’s thoughts about dreams and their relation to the workings of the unconscious, they in effect simply formed a part of the whole pool of diverse ideas that were circulating in Europe at that time. Solms’s claim that the movement was ‘’explicitly predicated ‘’on Freud’s writings, does not stand close examination. A suggestion that Rene Magritte understood Freud on a more intellectual level than the other surrealists is curious and would require a more thorough research than I want to give to it. Also contentious is the claim that,’’Their visions of our unconscious desires fuelled an explosion of disruptive art’’. Whilst the surrealists wanted to be disruptive, it is reasonable to argue that Freud’s work was just one of many useful resources and references for their writing and image making, as also were their political motivations.
The Dali painting that dominates the article page is ‘’Metamorphosis of Narcissus’’. There is no reference to this painting in the text so I’m guessing that it’s just there for effect. Dali has become the universally recognized face of surrealism in pictorial form. He appears on the cover of, ‘’coffee table’’ books and internet searches for surrealist art throw up his work. Perhaps the really interesting thing about this Observer article is the way in which the review of this new and essentially academic work by Marc Solms and written with the intention to clarify aspects of Freud’s classic work, has needed to be ‘’jazzed up’’ by featuring together Sigmund Freud, the work of the Surrealists with the use of Salvador Dali as its instantly presentable face.
Mark Solms book is to be released in Britain at the Freud Museum in London on September 19th. 2024.

The original article which is attached can be found by searching:
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/vanessathorpe
John Hunt AMA.

A visit to the Maria Abramović exhibition at the Royal Academy Maria Abramović has developed a considerable worldwide reputation as a performance artist and the RA put the full weight of their facilities behind her show during 2023.

Although performance art has been in existence for a long time, since the Dadaists set up the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, Abramović is particular in that she uses primarily her own body as the subject of the works, which often involves putting herself in physical danger.

The first thing that I would say is that the Academy show was not a piece of Performance Art. It was made up from reconstituted elements of her historical enactments in all sorts of venues around the world. There were very large screens displaying Abramović in some very disconcerting and sometimes distressing activities, the majority involving members of the public. Other pieces had elements of sculpture, some of them inviting interaction with the visitors to the show. I thought that these were generally quite weak. There was also a work in which two naked people lay on a two tier bunk bed type framework, each with a skeleton on top of them. I thought this basically comic but whether this was the intended effect, I’m not sure. The room title was ‘Comings and Goings’ so I guess it was a reference to sex and death…

The signature work, ‘Living Door’’ consisting of two naked people, one man and one women stand facing each other at either side of a narrow entrance and compelling the visitor to squeeze between them in order to gain access to the exhibition. When I arrived at the ‘’Door’’ it must have been on a tea break. This piece was first set up in 1977 in Bologna with Abramović herself as one element of the ‘Door’. The show was closed down after three days by police.

I thought that the exhibition, as set up at the Academy, lacked the continuity that a ‘’Performance’’ by Abramović herself might have offered. As one visitor said, ‘’It needed her presence to make any sense, otherwise it was just too many people wandering about aimlessly, looking for meaning.’’

A useful question to ask when regarding a performance work is how closely it follows to theatre. Abramović makes much use of her own body and the videos used in the show all emphasised this as being the central feature of her presentations. She makes a point of stressing the importance of the interaction between herself and the audience. This would appear largely theatrical but without a storyline in the usual sense of the term. The exhibition booklet tells us that she began as a painter and studied at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts but I could not detect any sign of this history in this show. Abramović is keen to establish her legacy and has set up the Marina Abramović Institute to train the next generation of performers in her ‘’Method’’. The training is designed to, ‘’prepare them mentally and physically to re-perform some of the artist’s most iconic works’’. This suggests that she regards her works as unique to her and therefore quite separate from other iterations of ideas that might be identified as Performance Art. It will be interesting to see if this Royal Academy exhibition is in any way a precursor of shows to follow.

The shape of this form of creative presentation has squeezed its way into our understanding of what art is, whether in the capital ‘A’ form or in the lower case version. There were hints of it at the recent Birmingham MA show and it will continue to attract students of a certain personality, maybe because it has not accumulated a heavy back story and therefore creatively presents more of a blank page.

Maria Abramović appeared on Desert Island Discs and a recording [LINK] can be found on the BBC website. The program is informative and sheds light on her upbringing in the old Yugoslavia and her later itinerant life. She is a very unusual woman and this is very evident in her work. After listening to her on the recorded program and reflecting on the Academy exhibition, I did gain a sense of how someone with her history and coming from that region of Europe, would pursue the very particular creative lifestyle that Maria Abramović has shaped for herself.

Thinking about an MA Fine Art
The Birmingham University School of Art offers a Master of Arts Fine Art diploma course. A private viewing of the student work from the course, took place at the end of August this year. Max White, who gave a Talk to the AMA in May of last year, had an invitation to the viewing together with the painter Barbara Shackley. The three of us were equally intrigued to see what sort of work would be presented by the graduates from this course. The show took place on the Margaret St. site of the Birmingham Art School and was the building where I first began to study the many aspects of art.

Students are offered one year, eighteen month or two year versions for their study, and the first thing to say is that the work on show was markedly diverse in the materials and methods employed to achieve a collection of very different results. The use of video was evident; images projected onto large surfaces. One has to ask how the projection of still or slightly moving pictures with a vaguely narrative reference, can achieve a substantial presence when compared to cinema in general, which is so well established and with which we are so familiar?

There were works made with non-traditional, non standard materials and fitting loosely within ideas of ‘‘Installation Art’’. These appeared in quite a few of the very large rooms within the Margaret Street building. The students who used this method for presentation were able to section off an area of a room to arrange their submissions.

`These Installations, or those works that might be labeled as such, seemed to be the preferred route for the majority of students in this show. Sculpture and printmaking were not much in evidence although there was one striking piece that resembled an animal skeleton and was rendered with a bone china like finish. I came across some works using small electric motors and others with electric lights. These could be regarded as kinetic works if one were looking for labels. In one large room I found a display that consisted of a robust wooden framework from which there hung long drapes of white paper. These were covered with copious printed text. I decided that I had neither the time nor inclination to read through them as I felt the construction in itself had no quality as a physical object and therefore had no visual appeal whatsoever.

It’s difficult to be too critical of the work without being in full possession of the intentions of the different students and the MA Fine Art does offer a very wide choice of options for students to select and make their personal statements. Whether or not they are all entirely directed to an end production of what might be called, ‘Fine Art’ work would be for the viewer to decide. I began to wonder exactly what sort of teachers/lecturers were available to cope with this comprehensive range of options and there must be a team of technicians on hand to make some of the ideas viable.

I know that students who enrol on the MA course are required to submit written submissions as a unit of their assessment and this forms a serious component of the coursework. This is hard to come to terms with if you are of the opinion that visual art is a language in itself and does not require a commentary, written or verbal. It’s a long way from David Hockney who refused to carry out his end of course essay and when threatened that failure to provide one would result in his final diploma being withheld, replied, ‘’ In that case I will paint my own diploma’’. The Art School in Margaret Street is a particularly beautiful building and I had four resident years in which to fully appreciate it. I found that a lot of structural alterations ( ifts, staircases, fire doors etc.) have been made, These have increased the space for Fine Art activity, but with the ghosts of architects, industrial designers and printers long departed, I found that my own recollections of that building as I remember it, had also gone.

BBC radio 4 recently used their regular 1-45-2-00pm. time slot to run ‘’The Banksy Story’’ in a series of episodes that can now be heard on BBC Sounds. Visual art gets sectioned with labels that the art world prints onto its ‘’filing cabinets’’. These are many and contain the definitive art movements, eg; cubism, surrealism, pop art , minimalism etc, etc. If one wishes to have an explanation for, say graffiti art, you open the drawer with that label. Graffiti art, it will say, is the arena for those who make their images on walls and other exterior objects, usually without the permission of the owner of said wall or object. It will follow on by locating this activity in its modern format, which emerged in the United States, created by young people who wanted to make their own images but did not have access to the chic Manhattan galleries used by those famous post war painters with their large canvases covered with freely applied, expansive paint surfaces.

As interest in the YBAs, (Young British Artists) has waned, and they appear to have had their day, we can now step back and assess exactly where their achievement lies and maybe find that there just might be a limit to how much Hirst and Emin we can continue to absorb. So the street painter known as Banksy has become the focus for media interest. It is easy to see why. This mystery painter who makes his pictures overnight, on possibly illegal sites and creates controversial ‘’events’’ in central London that attract those groupings who look for an illicit visual experience. This is always going to be ‘box office’.

The programmes are narrated by a self confessed fan of Banksy and tell the story of a secretive scarlet pimpernel who gathered around him a group of helpers who together created a successful commercial operation by making disconcerting, sometimes poignant images individually placed on the street and then reproducing them in numbers onto canvas. He makes copies of his work by using silk screen printing. This has led, as in the case of Andy Warhol, to accusations of copying, thus generating a need for an official authentication for each piece. It all leads to a really curious market in that some works are considered valuable and some not, depending on whether they are accredited by Pest Control, the name he gives to his official organisation. A brief look on eBay is an education.

In the case of Banksy one needs to take in the whole package. The young men who Spray painted their names on the New York subway carriages were regarded as vandals and they just had the ‘’kick’’ of seeing their name pass by on the elevated parts of the city’s transport system. Not until Jean-Michel Basquiat was persuaded to transfer his designs to canvas and display them in those chic New York Galleries was real money made and creative kudos received. With Banksy we have the human interest story: rags to riches, mysterious, fly by night painter, artist with two fingers to the established ‘’Art World’’, an anti hero for the media to play with. A painter I know, once said to me that Painters speak to us down through time; we know Rembrandt through his paintings and drawings. Pieter Bruegel tells us what it was like for a 16th century Flemish painter to travel overland to Italy.

The more recent practitioner can be separated away from his or her works; with books written, films made, character dissected. Eg: Van Gogh as the unbalanced lone genius dying a failure until resurrected with his very own museum. The reasoning is, I suppose, that If there’s a narrative to be made and presented to the public, then an understanding the work itself becomes accessible. With Banksy there is a package and it sports a variety of labels: performance artist, renegade urban graffiti-ist, installation artist, maybe commercial artist and a likely cartoonist. Take your pick. If we imagine Ronald Searle or Steve Bell crafting their work onto walls in open public spaces, could we possibly assess how they compare with a piece by Banksy? But this does not really work because the image on the wall is only part of the story, only part of the Banksy package. His style is not difficult to reproduce which may be why there are so may disputed pieces.

The work by the French graffiti artist Blek Le Rat is remarkably similar and pre-dates Banksy. A friend recently asked me how he could tell whether or not an artwork was ‘’good’’. There are no easy answers. Francis Bacon said, ‘Some paint (the image) comes directly onto the nervous system, other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain’. In other words either you get it or you don’t. The BBC programme shies well away from entering into art criticism, concentrating on ‘’The Banksy Story’’. Those of us who make images or objects will take a good look and formulate a view. Eventually he may come to be regarded as a spirit of our time and be remembered as someone who said to his audience, “This is what It looks like; this is how it really is”. Or he could come to be seen as just a smart maker of graphic pictures who filled up space in the tabloids and made for a good occasional slot on TV news, while making a lot of money.

The LSA Art Room: Satchwell Court, Leamington Spa
It’s approaching twelve months since Leamington Studio Artists opened a gallery in Satchwell Court. Following the closure of the 150 Gallery in 2015, the town centre has been in need of an art space to set against the number of overtly commercial galleries in the town.
LSA Art Room is a gallery for local art practitioners who are LSA members. These exhibit their work for local people to view the art that is taking place in and around the area where they themselves live. The Art Room displays paintings and prints using a similar format to that used by the Royal Academy for its annual exhibition. This is in contrast to its predecessor in Livery Street which saw itself as following the presentation mode of a London, (Cork St. etc.) gallery.

The displaying of paintings and prints from floor to ceiling has the advantage of showing as much work as possible and giving the visiting public a chance to take in a wide range of styles and presentations. LSA also provide space for members to make work and display their ideas and techniques to visitors. If there is a disadvantage to this form of display, it is that some of the more subtle pieces can get lost amid the more chromatically vivid pieces, as can those pieces hung too low down to provide comfortable viewing. Those artists who have been able to show a simultaneous collection of their work have, it could be argued, created a more effective impression than those who exhibit the occasional piece; but this only to be expected.

I found it refreshing to find that the LSA has avoided the need to present any printed text as ancillary explanation to the images on show. There is nothing worse than watching visitors to an exhibition peering at a display of words and trying to reconcile the visual images with those words.

LSA seem to quite like themed exhibitions. For one recent show, the members were invited to submit work on the theme of ‘’Deadly Sins’’. There was no performance art to be seen and the titles of certain pieces when related to their content, could be regarded as elastic.
The majority of LSA members who show at the Art Room use the traditional format for 2D work. Some push the envelope a little by drawing on ideas developed in the United States during the last century but most pursue their own vision and with those means that are familiar to them.

With some exceptions, the dimensions of the works on display are medium to small. Those pictures that are larger than about one metre square tend to get cramped in among the overall volume of exhibits. Some works of sculpture do get displayed and create interest from visitors, but this exhibition space does not really lend itself to sculpture, which needs some personal space for it to breathe. Whilst some criticism can be made of the Art Room, it remains a magnet for anyone interested in viewing work by those artists who are seriously committed to the art they make, in contrast to the expensive, excessive, gaudy, and generally empty offerings on show in other parts of the town. If the public as a whole get to see the difference, LSA will have done Leamington Spa a service.

There is no advantage in singling out the work of individuals although visitors to the gallery have been fortunate to view some really fine pieces of work by certain artists. It is more than reassuring to discover that the venture has proved to be financially rewarding for those involved and helped in some way to offset the spate of closures of retail outlets that have recently hit the town.

The LSA Art Room opened last year and those people who first got the show on the road are to be congratulated. Also very impressive is the capacity to keep the show going with a rota of attendants who, aside from hanging the work, engage with the public and make the gallery an enjoyable place to visit. Let’s hope that the venture can continue.

Please note that the AMArtists group will not accept for exhibition purposes, giclée produced copies of original artwork, e.g. paintings, drawings, collages etc.
However, original photographs produced using the giclée process will be accepted.
Members wishing to display giclée prints for advertising etc. can do so (unframed) in browsers or similar units.