ADFAS gave a grant of £300 to Hertfordshire Young Carers to help fund art-related activities in school holidays, with one session for 10-12-year-olds and one for 13-18-year-olds.

ADFAS donated £500 to the Hospice to fund art materials for inpatients/outpatients and carers in the Wellness Sessions. The photos show some of the creations. 

We were delighted to receive the attached picture of art work on the school fence for everybody to enjoy. This was made possible by one of this year's ADFAS donations. 

Local Art Competition for Primary Schools reaches highest standard yet 

Children from 14 schools across Dacorum came together to celebrate their artistic achievements this weekend, at an award ceremony for the Dacorum Young Artists competition. 

The children and their families attended the event at Open Door Berkhamsted, where their shortlisted art works are on display in the gallery. 

Now in its sixth year, the annual competition for local school children (years 4 & 5) aims to foster art in the face of pressure from mainstream subjects. This year the competition had to take place online due to Covid restrictions, but the panel of judges, led by leading local artists Mary Casserley, still had over 240 entries to choose from.  

Awarded Best Overall was Laurence Blythe of Potten End School, 2nd placed was Poppy Rogers of The Thomas Coram School and 3rd was Archie Thompson of Long Marston School. These students were awarded trophies and vouchers to spend on art materials at Berkhamsted Arts & Crafts. The Overall winner, Laurence, had his name engraved on the competition Cup which will take pride of place for a year at his school. 

Mary Casserley spoke at the event and offered inspiration to the young people, describing her journey from talented child artist growing up in Berkhamsted, to her present day career as artist and illustrator. She commented, “The entries to this year's competition were of a higher standard than ever and it was a very tough choice to pick the winners. All of you should be very proud of your work!”  

Berkhamsted Mayor, Cllr Stephen Claughton was guest of honour at the ceremony, which was also attended by the President of Berkhamsted Rotary, John Whiteley and representatives of the competition's backers. Dacorum Young Artists is promoted and supported by the Rotary Clubs of Berkhamsted and Hemel Hempstead, The Arts Society Gade Valley and Ashridge Decorative & Fine Arts Society. 

“It’s been a fantastic morning meeting all these talented young artists,” said Joan Fisher, Manager of Open Door “We learnt first-hand how beneficial the competition has been for some children who have struggled over the past year, giving them a creative goal to focus on has really boosted their wellbeing.” 

The competition to find the  Dacorum Young Artists of 2022 has been launched this month, with the theme of ‘What should Your World look like in 2050?' berkorotary.org

The Dacorum Young Artists exhibition can be viewed in the gallery at Open Door until Saturday 2nd October from 9.30am – 3.30pm. 

The ADFAS Committee were delighted to support Daisy Berry, who has secured herself a place at the prestigious Royal Drawing School in London. Daisy had just completed her sixth form studies at Tring School. 

An example of Daisy’s work is shown here.

Masked Bowerbird Coloured Pencil on Paper

As part of the feedback the Committee received from those past and present members attending the ADFAS 50th Anniversary Party in March 8th 2017 at the Boxmoor Lodge Hotel, there was praise for both the short presentation by Nicola Collins, the impressive Head of Art and Design at J F Kennedy School in Hemel Hempstead, and for the display of some of their work. You will recall that we had used some of the funds provided through reclaiming Gift Aid on your membership fees to pay for a small printing press for this school.  

Photographs of the evening, including those of Nicola and the work produced by her pupils, are in the earlier announcement on this website. 

Here are her words from that evening.

Good evening everyone.

First of all I would like to thank you all for inviting me to help celebrate your 50th anniversary celebrations. I hope you are all having a lovely evening. I am honoured to be up here speaking to you all tonight about how ADFAS has been generously supporting the creative development of our students at John F Kennedy School.

When I took on the role as head of art and design almost three years ago, one of my primary goals was to extend the curriculum opportunities for our students to include both sculptural and printmaking media. The sculptural aspect was pretty straight forward. Collect a ton of recycled materials, throw in a bit of artistic inspiration and away you go. Within a year our students were exhibiting, not only some lovely drawings and paintings at our annual show, but also a gigantic polar bear with wings, a seven foot fridge sculpture and an artful armchair made out chicken wire and an old car door. Kids are nothing if not resourceful!

The challenge we faced was how to introduce professional standard printmaking into the art curriculum at a time when all state school budgets are being squeezed across the country and many school are having to cut creative subjects out of the curriculum entirely, because of the running costs they incur.

This is where your ADFAS group came to the rescue. With your generous donation, we have been able to invest in a professional standard printing press and supporting equipment to be able offer our students the experience of creating work with this versatile art form.

Just to clarify, a printmaking press is not the same machine you have at home that’s attached to your computer. A fine art printing press ranges from £500 to £10,000 in price, is monumentally heavy and, if kept in good nick, can work for several hundred years. Hopefully, I won’t be teaching as long as our press lasts, before the government say I can qualify for my pension!

Specifically, we have acquired an etching press. It consists of two hard rollers that are in contact with a flat hard bed. These rollers are pushed toward one another, squeezing the bed between them. One of the rollers is turned by a hand crank, which propels the bed from one end to the other. The pressure is used to push dampened paper into the recesses of the etched plate. The paper pulls the ink out of the recesses, and voilá, a print is born.

The different printmaking methods we can now introduce to our students with this press include drypoint etching, collographs, monoprinting, lino cut and wood cut.    Examples of these along with some of the students' own work is at the back of the room, if you would like to have a look.

The benefits of teaching printmaking at secondary level are huge. It is an intellectual and manual process that is hugely engaging, physically hard work and at times, extremely messy. The immediacy and range of results that can be created in just a few hours appeals to students of all abilities. The secret of teaching intaglio seems to consist of a minimum of explanation on the part of the teacher and a maximum of experimentation and discovery on the part of the student. Students often discover ways of working that the teacher has completely overlooked. The potential for artistic discovery with this new printing press is extremely exciting and we are hugely grateful for your support.

We recently received a plea from Lauren Rayner and her team to see if we could fund them for three state of the art so-called Visualisation Units for their department.   One of these units in each art class room enables the art teacher to show off detailed processes to their students without either leaving their desks!           

Our Chairman Julie Griffiths had a trip out to view the newly delivered equipment in use in one of the art rooms at the School.                         

Image: Julie is seen here with HH Head of Art, Lauren Rayner, together with her newly qualified teacher from the beginning of this school year, Tianna Trotman.

In February  2020 ADFAS hosted Tring School's Pop-Up Art Exhibition provided to us by Students Grace Mason and Harriet Atkinson using a variety of media and techniques.

In total on the night, we were very pleased to welcome ten students from Tring School plus the occasional parent! 

Our Young Arts Coordinator Pam Langdon-Pratt, Visits Organiser Barbara Mitchell and Chairman Julie Griffiths were given a very warm welcome at The Astley Cooper School in Hemel Hempstead last week.                 

This included meeting some Year 8 students and being able to see their work books developing their project.                      

They have been using work by Claes Oldenburg to inspire work in clay to produce some amazing representations of very elaborate cakes.           

This American sculptor is best known for his public art installations typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. 

We were also delighted to present a cheque from ADFAS for £1,130 to the school for use by the Art Department to purchase a slab roller for clay and the equipment to run it. 

Image: The ADFAS team with Astley Cooper staff and students

As we approach the start of new ADFAS season, your Committee is very pleased to report that we have had an extremely successful year on the Young Arts front.

Within the last twelve months we have supported young artists in the Dacorum area with grants totalling £3,250. This sum has been generated by recovering the Gift Aid on our members’ subscriptions – something we are able to do as a result of being one of a minority of societies within The Arts Society orbit to be a Registered Charity.

Included in these figures are:

 * Three bursaries to successful A-level Arts students starting further study at College

 * Support for Art Departments at three local schools in the area

        > Potten End Primary School – Art materials

        > Tring School - Easels

        > John F Kennedy School, Hemel Hempstead – ongoing materials for the printing press ADFAS funded last year

 * Dumfries House Youth Training Scheme – Glasgow (following our annual residential visit earlier this year when we were impressed by their work)

 * Financial Support to the annual Dacorum Young Artists exhibition

We thought that you would like to see some of the art work carried out in school and outside by the beneficiaries of the three Bursaries provided by ADFAS this summer - Evie, Francesca and Joseph. 

These are the student's choices and their words.

Evie's work (JFK School)

Now looking forward to starting her course in Fine Arts after successfully completing her A-Levels at John F Kennedy School, here is material from Evie:-

Most of my work focuses on the human form, as it is the subject I find most interesting and relatable.   During my project in A-levels however, I wanted to look at the destruction of the human form within the project title of symbiosis - looking as parasitism closely, as I was extremely interested in looking at the subversion of standardised, controlled beauty.

From this I wanted to investigate teenage culture, most specifically the addictions of adult life that manifest in teenage-hood.   Using the work of photographers, designers and artists alike, I completed my project using many different artistic methods, such as paintings, drawings, graphic illustrations and collage, their variety mimicking the exact chaos of teenage culture and addiction that I so wanted to capture.

Furthering my artwork past my A levels, I hope to continue to play with different mediums and explore artistic processes that I have not yet discovered.

Francesca's work (JFK School)

Another student from this year's A-Level Art candidates from John F Kennedy School, Francesca is off to study Graphic Arts at Southampton University and has kindly provided some of her work for ADFAS to display here.

Throughout my A Level course I focused on various themes including natural forms, violence and for my final project, I explored the notion of sections.

Within this, I explored childhood nostalgia through the symbolism of retro sweets and the distortion of these memories and feelings as an individual matures.  Along with this, I also looked at the impact of bee extinction upon human life - something that we don’t always think about and may take for granted.

For these projects, I decided to focus more on painting as this is something I have previously not been confident with and wanted to improve on, as well as elements of collage and mixed media. These techniques were inspired by many artists such as Tom Phillips and Sarah Graham. 
Recently I have started exploring digital art and graphic illustration, this is something that I hope to improve on at my time in university as well as continuing to experiment with both traditional and new methods.

As part of our ADFAS remit of supporting Young Arts locally, our association was delighted to have the opportunity to fully finance the purchase of a Polymetaal Printing Press and the necessary accompanying materials – pens and dyes etc. for the Art Department at the John F Kennedy Catholic Secondary School in Hemel Hempstead.   This equipment was delivered to the school early in the Summer term of 2016.

Several members of our committee very much enjoyed the visit we made to this thriving and exciting Art Department.   We were initially welcomed by the Deputy Head of JFK, and later introduced to several senior students and their inspirational Head of Art, Nicola Collins.  

We were very impressed by the varied and innovative work displayed, the high standards achieved and the infectious enthusiasm of the pupils we saw and met.

The Press, once installed, will be used at first, to teach the students dry point etching and develop skills in intaglio printing. This process will gradually be embedded into the art curriculum of the school and also enable students to explore and enjoy the use of a new medium.

For the future, the possibilities are endless.   We will keep closely in touch with the school and look forward to further visits.

It is planned for a presentation of the initial work that is generated to be shown at one of our meetings.

Text from an article in the two local editions of the Gazette newspaper in March 2016.

Treasurer's note:   All the funds to support projects such as this come at no cost to the group, since we have used the reclaimed Gift Aid money received from HMRC to support Young Arts in this way.

Young Arts Co-ordinator note:  ADFAS are always on the lookout for good projects of all sorts in the Young Arts arena.

This photo shows our Chairman Valerie Gunnpresenting our Printing Press cheque toNicola Collins, Head of Art at J F Keneddy School together with Pam Langdon-Pratt, our Young Arts Co-ordinator with two of the Sixth Form Art pupils who will be benefiting from this new facility. 

The location is the JFK art display area with some of the work done in the last year on show.