A couple of years ago, two fine actors, Nancy Carroll and Christopher Villiers, found themselves playing minor roles in a movie about a male stripper, Magic Mike’s Last Dance. During the long hours of shooting in a London theatre, they discovered a shared passion for painting. Realising that their profession was filled with artists of all kinds, they set about organising an exhibition, Mama (Many Actors Make Art), which which was first mounted in 2023 in the basement of a building in Brixton, south London, called the Department Store. The second edition is now on and it is a real eye-opener.
Firstly, the scale is remarkable: there are 259 works by 40 artists. But Carroll tells me there is no attempt to curate “Actors,” she says, “are so used to rejection that Chris and I decided that nothing should be turned down. But we also wanted the show to be of some use so, while the actors are free to sell their work, a 10% commission goes to the Theatre Artists Fund set up by Sam Mendes and Netflix to provide help for hard-pressed freelancers. There is also a lucky dip, which means that, for a £20 donation, you get an unmarked envelope containing a surprise work.” I put down my money and am now the proud owner of a colourful portrait by James Fleet called Film Festival Sketchbook.
Apart from the scale, what is impressive is the sheer diversity of the exhibition. Mark Gatiss has a striking quartet of portraits and landscapes. Jenny Eclair in her exotic paintings of places paints the town red. Anastasia Hille has a table filled with delicate handmade ceramics in stoneware and porcelain. Sam West made me laugh with a photo-collage composed of three-word phrases found in public spaces (for example, Cat Castration Box, Marmite Smugglers Wanted and Customise My Broth). Caroline Quentin specialises in horticultural pictures collected in book form in Drawn to the Garden. The exhibition’s prime movers are also highly visible. Carroll reveals her canine obsession in acrylic on canvas and Villiers shows his fondness for sport and travel in pictures ranging from Cromer Golf Club to Sunrise in Namibia.
But what is it that motivates actors, so used to expressing themselves on stage and screen, to create art in private? Amanda Root, who sculpts in ceramic clay, comes up with the clearest answer. “Sculpting a head,” she says, “is very like acting. You are trying to capture someone’s essence and convey their inner emotional life. At the same time it is a mathematical process in which you measure everything like billy-o such as the precise distance between the different features of the face. I suppose it is that combination of the intuitive and the technical that drives me on.”
One of the results, in the beautifully sculpted head of a 94-year-old sitter, is the single piece in the exhibition I most coveted.
Talking to some of the actors in front of their work, I found they had a number of motives for their artistic impulse. Independently, both Rufus Wright and Richard Hansell Knott told me they had had inspirational art teachers at school who sowed a seed that, in the midst of their acting careers, flowered unexpectedly. James Hayes, now something of a veteran, told me how late in life he took a course at Richmond art school that led him to pick up pen and brush: “I lose myself so completely in the work,” he said, “that I find my physical complaints become irrelevant”, which sounds very like the notion of “Dr Theatre” in which acting temporarily banishes illness.
Sylvestra Le Touzel, by contrast, is driven by the urge to record the work of fellow performers such as Mark Rylance as a pyjama-clad Hamlet. As I admire her pen-and-ink portraits, she tells me that I once wrote an article saying that an RSC Les Enfants du Paradis and a Jonathan Miller Midsummer Night’s Dream were the two worst shows I had seen all year. As she was in both, she felt in some way obscurely responsible.
But in the end this free exhibition is purely and simply a celebration of creativity. It has no overarching theme or idea but leaves you filled with wonder at the joy so many actors derive in so many different forms from artistic self-expression. My one regret is that this life-enhancing show closes on Thursday.