Art Appreciation Group Gallery
The topic for our December meeting arose from the group’s visit to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery earlier this year to the ‘Turning to See: From Van Dyck to Lucian Freud’ exhibition. The exhibition was curated by internationally renowned Worcestershire artist, John Stezaker, who has become famous for creating portraits by using collage to join together two or more faces and create unsettling and thought provoking ‘new’ faces. Stezaker uses images of well known people, like media celebrities, politicians and actors but the clever selection of the faces and careful juxtaposition of the selected components mean that the hairline and facial features of each person segue almost imperceptively into someone else. It was suggested that we ought to have a go at this technique so we set ourselves some homework, which we brought along to discuss at the meeting.
It was interesting that each member of the group had seen something different in the task so there were some fascinating variations on the theme but everyone, without exception, brought work of real merit and style. In fact, we rather surprised ourselves! Initially, each person showed their piece of work and explained their approach. This created a lot of interesting discussion about images and portraiture and, in addition, we all felt an unexpected emotional response to many of the collages. Some seemed creepy and repellent, others, dreamy, others posed philosophical questions or had a sharp political message. In the later part of the meeting, we laid out all the work and examined them as a collection of images. The similarities and differences were highlighted by seeing them put alongside each other and this generated more interesting discussion.
It was interesting that each member of the group had seen something different in the task so there were some fascinating variations on the theme but everyone, without exception, brought work of real merit and style. In fact, we rather surprised ourselves! Initially, each person showed their piece of work and explained their approach. This created a lot of interesting discussion about images and portraiture and, in addition, we all felt an unexpected emotional response to many of the collages. Some seemed creepy and repellent, others, dreamy, others posed philosophical questions or had a sharp political message. In the later part of the meeting, we laid out all the work and examined them as a collection of images. The similarities and differences were highlighted by seeing them put alongside each other and this generated more interesting discussion.
