As always
with the RA Summer Exhibition, it is always a complete mix of the weird and
wonderful, interspersed with some very interesting pieces.
I will start
with what I consider “the bad” – and have to say that was mainly the
Academicians themselves. Most of the
work on view appeared mediocre at best, nothing new and a number just appeared
to be copying someone else without even bothering to add anything to it – such
as Alan Davie RA’s work Transformation of the Ad no 2 just reminded me of
Gillian Ayres, Mick Moon RA’s “For Patrick (His Villa)” (a linear drawing of a
building almost obscured by white trees and branches) was obviously heavily
influenced by Peter Doig’s “Architects Home in the Ravine”
One work I
did find interesting was Jock McFadyen’s “Tate Moss” a large (200 x 300cm) work
in oil of an old and/or abandoned industrial building by a river. What interested me about this piece was the
handling of the paint and the textures created.
The artist has worked up the paint from very dilute washes and dripped
paint (for the water and silted bank) up to thick impasto (from recent
experiments looks like paint has been applied and then pressed into with a
palette knife) for the peeling paintwork on the wooden planks. The artist has also used sgraffito on the
windows, blue doors and graffiti on the doors.
Spattering and dripping has also been used with difficult consistencies
of paint to achieve the weathered, worn and abandoned effects. The only thing that didn’t feel right to me
about this painting was the solid blue of the sky – I know it was probably used
to tie together the river, the bright door and the sense of abandonment we see
by seeing the sky through the building – but to me it is just too blue which I
felt jarred with the remainder of the painting.
On the same
subject of landscape, Frederick Cumming’s piece “the Angel of the South,
Dungeness” appealed to me in its simplicity and achieving a great sense of
space and atmosphere in a fairly small painting (75 x 75cm) and by using a very
limited, neutral palette brought to life with the sliver of white to represent
the sea and the minimal red poppies in the foreground.
This
painting is part of a number of coastal scenes by this artist, who appears to
have studied this particular view in a series of paintings, some of which on
this link.
On a more
abstract note, Prof Ian McKeever RA’s trilogy of paintings “Three”, I found
interesting in terms of colour, transparency and technique. There are two red/deep red paintings framing
a more neutral, black and white image.
On researching the artist further, he obviously has a deep fascination
with transparency, using sheer, layered images to create his work. These layers make the works quite ethereal
and dreamlike by building up layers of very transparent stained images.
An
Academician with a sense of humour is probably the best way to describe
Cornelia Parker’s work “Stolen Thunder” (digital pigment print) – a blank frame
and mount surrounded by the Summer Exhibition’s ubiquitous red dots (and,
obviously, with just as many red dots under it to denote the sales!).
Probably the
most unnerving work was John Humphreys’ “Ipsius Imago a Latere Extensia”, an
acrylic painted fibreglass head. At
first, I couldn’t work out why but looking more closely (from the side), the
head is very distorted by flattening the skull and stretching the face towards
the nose. This gives the impression of
the head moving towards you – very strange!
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