You are now in the first section of the exhibition, called Open Exhibitions, which brings together 10 of the over 200 paintings, drawings and pastels in the collection that have a label on the back of the frame indicating that Amiss submitted them to open-submission exhibitions.
It seems that after her early success exhibiting works at the Royal Academy, Amiss primarily submitted her work to other artist-led societies’ exhibitions, many of which were hosted at the Mall Galleries in London.
Before we began developing this exhibition, there was a perception that Amiss had not been able to exhibit many of her works this way. For example, she wrote to her sister in the early 2000s about lots of her artworks having been rejected by the Mall Galleries.
Whilst this is true, according to their archive she had much more success with them earlier in her career, and at least 54 of her works were displayed in their open exhibitions between the 1960s and 1990s. Most are not in the archive of Amiss’s work donated to the Wellcome Collection, suggesting that they may have been sold when first exhibited, like the works she exhibited at the Royal Academy.
There were about ten artists’ societies that Amiss regularly submitted work to. In front of you are a group of three paintings Amiss submitted to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters over the course of the 1980s. Displayed together, they show the development in her painting style over that decade, from a layered and impressionistic still-life to a more quickly rendered scene.
The first on the right is taller than it is wide and measures 42 x 33 cm. It has a simple, narrow wooden frame, painted gold and chipped in places.
This painting is called ‘Vase of Flowers’, submitted for exhibition in 1981. It is painted with bold brushwork. The tulip-style blooms are red, and the green stems are highlighted with yellow. The glass vase appears to stand on a window ledge of dark brown wood, which contains splashes of red. Thick black lines define the vase, swooping either side of it. This painting is full of movement. Immediately beyond the window, it looks as if a narrow stream is flowing in front of a vibrant green riverbank, matching the green and yellow of the stems in the vase. This could represent the idea of drawing the outside in.
To the left of ‘Vase of Flowers’ is another painting called ‘Avenue of Autumn Plane-trees, Clapham Common’, which Amiss submitted for an exhibition two years later. It is landscape in format measures 28 cm wide x 23 cm tall. It shows six brown trunks in a semicircle around a dark yellow patch of ground. The lines of the brushwork suggest tree bark. The tree’s trunks are topped with olive-green canopies and set against a horizontal sweep of blue paint suggesting sky. The foreground is blotched with grey scatter marks, as if it is raining.
Most of the artworks that Amiss exhibited in Mall Galleries exhibitions were not in her home when she died, meaning they are not in the archive of her work at the Wellcome Collection. This painting is an exception, as it was exhibited in 1983.
The third painting, on the far left, is ‘Christmas Lights, Oxford Street’, submitted to the same artists’ society in 1987. It measures 29 cm wide x 34 cm tall. It is an explosion of green and yellow paint above swirls of deep midnight blue. In both of these last two paintings, the artist’s initials, A J A, are clearly placed in the lower left-hand corner.
What is striking about all three images is the energy and confidence with which they are painted, the latter two appearing to have been captured in a few quick bursts of paint, with the speed of a sketch.
This is the end of track two. The tactile path now leads behind you to the next stop.