Wednesday 1st March 2023

Art Behind Bars: The Role of the Arts in Breaking the Cycle of Crime, Prison and Re-Offending   

Lecturer – Angela Findlay

Angela Findlay gave a unique insight into the destructive and costly cycle of crime, prisons, and re-offending. She explaine how the arts can have a huge impact in terms of rehabilitation; how, within the process of creating art, there are opportunities for offenders to confront their crimes and develop the key life skills essential to leading positive and productive lives. She has had a long career of teaching art in prisons in Germany and England, and later experience as Arts Coordinator of the Koestler Arts charity.

The Arts Society West Midlands Area, with the help of generous donations from individual societies, including one from The Arts Society Royal Leamington Spa, is currently engaging with Koestler Arts on a pilot project in Her Majesty’s Prison Birmingham and three other regional institutions.

Here’s a link to their website:
Koestler Arts

Wednesday 3rd May 2023

Lucy Kemp-Welch: Painter of Horses  

Lecturer – David Haycock

David Haycock introduced us to Lucy Kemp-Welch, known as the portrait painter of horses.  Lucy was very well known in her lifetime but fell out of favour when horses were not essential and cars and tractors took over.  Her lifelong passion was horses and she said “Horses are to me the breath of life”. One of her most well known paintings is usually hung in the Leamington Art Gallery and Museum but it on tour until the end of the year.

Wednesday 1st February 2023

Bruegel: The Seasons of the World

Lecturer: Gavin Plumley

In 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder was commissioned to create a series of paintings for a dining room in Antwerp. The images, charting the course of a year, changed the way we view the world through art. This lecture will explore how Bruegel pioneered a new way of thinking about the environment and our individual places within a shifting cosmos.

A writer and broadcaster, appearing on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and contributing to newspapers, magazines, and opera and concert programmes worldwide, Gavin Plumley lectures widely about the culture of Central Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Recent lectures have included those to the Royal Opera House, the National Gallery, the National Theatre, the British Museum and the Neue Galerie in New York.

Wednesday 2nd November 2022

A Painter Looks at Cezanne

Lecturer: Ghislaine Howard

In this lecture Ghislaine Howard looked at the art and life of Cezanne with the understanding and knowledge that comes from having spent her own life making paintings.

Ghislaine is a painter of national reputation named as a Woman of The Year 2008 for her contribution to art and society. She has exhibited widely at many prestigious venues such as Manchester Art Gallery, Canterbury Cathedral and Imperial War Museum North and has work in major public collections including The Royal Collection.

She specialises in inspirational talks about the pleasure to be gained by an intimate contemplation of painting.

She has lectured widely and is an associate lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Frozen Breath of the Polar Night: An Introduction to Art Nouveau Glass

Wednesday 7th September 2022

Justine Hopkins

‘Glass is a marvellous material. Everything about it makes it an incomparable plastic medium in the hands of an ingenious artist, offering his imagination and talent almost limitless scope for discovery’. [René Lalique].

Marguerite vase by Émile Gallé dated 1896

Glass: tough, fragile and unpredictable; colourful or colourless; capable of flowing like metal or being carved like stone. To be shaped it must be heated and reheated to extreme temperatures and as it cools it may shatter explosively without stringent precautions. No two pieces will ever be identical, and what you think you placed in the kiln will rarely if ever come out exactly as you expected and planned. Glass is dangerous, difficult and glamorous; a combination which has fascinated craftsmen and artists, chemists and collectors throughout history.

The 19th century saw the beginnings of the shift of glass-working from craft to art, and Art Nouveau glass remains some of the most spectacular ever produced. It offered a unique range of opportunities for translating the swirling energies and sinuous lines of Art Nouveau into objects to enchant the eye and intrigue the mind.

This lecture explored the achievement of the masters of Art Nouveau glass, Émile Gallé, Louis Comfort Tiffany and René Lalique, and their outstanding contribution to one of the most important movements of the last century.

Justine Hopkins studied History of Art at the Courtauld Institute. She has lectured regularly for Tate Britain, Tate Modern, V&A, National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, as well as to Oxbridge and Bristol Universities, Christies Fine Art, the Art Fund, and groups such as the Friends of Covent Garden and U3A. Her publications include ‘The Art of John Martin’ (2001), ‘Michael Ayrton: A Biography’ (1994) and articles for Apollo Magazine and Modern Painters.

Click here for additional notes for this lecture from Justine.