Audrey Amiss: Creating Outside of the Canon

by Eilís Doolan

As the popularity of ‘outsider art’ has risen, the art world has made significant strides in considering the voices of marginalised or disenfranchised artists. Audrey Amiss is a striking example of an unknown artist whose immense oeuvre, which was only discovered after her death, is marked by issues of mental health. Amiss’ art allows a bewildering glimpse into the life of a woman wholly preoccupied with artmaking, collecting, and recording.   

After her death in 2013, at the age of 79, Amiss’s family found her London home filled with artworks. To their astonishment, they found paintings stacked against the walls, scrapbooks and sketchbooks piled up on tables, and wardrobes packed with diaries. Though they knew their aunt was an artist, Amiss’s nephew and niece Steve Weatherell and Kate Tunnicliff, who discovered the extraordinary collection, were overwhelmed by the quantity of material she left behind. In the flat, they found paintings, scrapbooks, diaries, as well as a thousand filled sketchbooks – totalling around 50,000 sketches. Amiss had spent years documenting her life with compelling persistence.

One of Amiss’s paintings, photograph belonging to Steve Weatherell

Born in Sunderland, Amiss started painting at a young age, eventually studying at the prestigious Royal Academy. However, her study was abruptly cut short when she suffered a mental breakdown in 1958. Amiss ended up in the former Croydon mental hospital. Years later she would come to believe her breakdown was the result of a conspiracy against her. After her release, Amiss continued to pursue art in private, frustrated by the workings of the art world. She trained as a shorthand typist, and spent the next thirty years working as a civil servant. Up to her 2013 death, Amiss was admitted to psychiatric institutions on multiple occasions, during which she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia. After her breakdown, Amiss wrote of her art: “I’m avant-garde and misunderstood. They think I’m incompetent.”

The collection left behind by Amiss, particularly her diaries or ‘logbooks,’ as she referred to them, range from light-hearted musings to expressions of her profound, and sometimes disturbing, thoughts. They record her own way of seeing the world. All of Amiss’ art seems committed to cataloguing her daily experiences: from the food she ate, to the money she spent, to what she watched on TV. Several books found in the flat record every letter Amiss sent – an average of eight a day— including short summaries of the contents of the letters, and the exact details of the envelopes and stamps used. Correspondences range from the Queen to Mother Teresa and McDonalds customer service. Amiss wrote one letter, addressed to the Sherlock Holmes society, about her missing sock. In other correspondences, Amiss wrote to mental patient’s rights groups, MPs, and local politicians to describe her mistreatment as a patient, for which she blamed specific individuals, and the police force as a whole.

Amiss’s scrapbooks, too, offer an insight into how her vision of the world impacted her art. Overflowing with visual imagery and clearly arranged with aesthetic design in mind, the scrapbooks contain newspaper clippings, found objects, and packaging from the food and drinks she consumed. After gluing them in, Amiss annotated the designs of the wrappers, comparing them to other artworks or linking them with names of acquaintances or celebrities by a perplexing process of word association. On one page, Amiss critiques a bowl of Kellogg’s Frosties, writing that it “resembles a storm in a tea cup.”

One of Amiss’s logbooks filled with food wrappers, photograph belonging to the Wellcome Library Archive

Amiss’ paintings and sketches, it seems, were all created from real life. While some sketchbooks are filled with street scenes, others show objects around the house. Many are filled with life drawings, often of female nudes. While her oil paintings seem most indebted to her time at the RA, during which Amiss participated in the school of realism, these later sketches are more abstracted, sometimes incomprehensible. Some are brought to life by hasty scribbles and transitory lines of colour, while others convey a limb or body with a single line. In almost all cases, the sketches are accompanied by notes or descriptions, and the date and subject are meticulously recorded. In a personal correspondence with Steve, Amiss’s nephew, he tells me how he would sometimes sit for his Aunt’s drawings, which she always completed swiftly, taking much longer to write detailed titles and the date.

1 page of a sketchbook, depicting a female nude, photograph belonging to Steve Weatherell

2 pages of a sketchbook, depicting a group of sketches of Hyde Park and Bond street, photograph belonging to Steve Weatherell

While the interest in ‘outsider art’ may be a relatively new development, an interest in the intersection between art and mental illness is not. In fact, the popular trope of artist as a ‘mad genius’ on the irrational quest for creativity is one which has persisted throughout history. From Dürer’s melancholia as the inevitable fate of the genius to Goya’s irrational nightmares in The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, a perceived connection between ‘madness’ and creativity seems to persist. Gericault famously depicted mental patients with dignity and human sympathy in his portraits of the “insane.” Van Gogh turned the lens upon himself, scrutinising his own torment and despair. Perhaps the most famous artwork to take madness as its central theme is Munch’s The Scream, in which madness is the presented as the sane response to an insane world.

What Audrey Amiss’s art offers is a more nuanced view of the life of an artist. There are no exhibition catalogues, comments by curators, or interviews with the artist to draw from. Instead, there is simply Amiss’s life’s work. At times, her art verges on the incomprehensible, seemingly offering a glimpse into a mind subjected to paranoia. Yet, Amiss’s collection simultaneously paints a picture of a meticulous and dedicated woman who tirelessly documented her vision of the world. 

As such, Audrey Amiss reminds us of the complexity of artists, proving a valuable lesson to art historians and archivists alike.

After her death, Amiss’s family donated her collection to the Wellcome Institute, a London museum which explores connections between medicine, life, and art. There, archivists have been working since 2013 on presenting Audrey’s life through her extraordinary collection. Carol Morley, filmmaker and recipient of the Wellcome screenwriting fellowship, whose films so far have all featured complex female protagonists, has been working towards making a film about Amiss. The film is likely to shoot later this year.

Bibliography:

 Intense Colours (blog). Accessed 2 November 2019. http://intensecolours.blogspot.com/?m=1.

 Johnstone, Fiona. “Don’t tell me I’m mad. This is the truth.” The Polyphony. Published 22 May 2019. Accessed 2 November 2019. https://thepolyphony.org/2019/05/22/dont-tell-me-im-mad-this-is-the-truth-archiving-audrey-amisss-life-as-an-artist-and-mental-health-patient/.

 Jones, Jonathan. “A short history of mental illness in art.” Guardian. Published 15 January 2015. Accessed November 2 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/society/christmas-charity-appeal-2014-blog/2015/jan/13/-sp-a-short-history-of-mental-illness-in-art.

 Mitchell, Wendy. “Toronto Interview: Carol Morely on her police drama ‘Out of Blue’.” Screen Daily. Published 7 September 2018. Accessed 2 November 2019. https://www.screendaily.com/features/toronto-interview-carol-morley-on-her-police-drama-out-of-blue/5132399.article.

 Morley, Carol. “The amazing undiscovered life of Audrey the artist.” Guardian. Published 20 November 2016. Accessed 2 November 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/nov/20/carol-morley-discovers-amazing-life-of-artist-audrey-amiss.