Summer Exhibition 2016 (part 1)

I went to the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy this week.  It was hot this week, very hot, and the Royal Academy had an air conditioning system.  There is no doubt this enhanced my experience.  It was a blessed relief in fact.  This is the first part of a series of blogs on the works that made an impression on me.

It has to be said that the initial impression of the exhibition is not good.  There are two reasons for this.  The first is the sheer number of exhibits is at first overwhelming. You are left with just an impression of brightly coloured nonsense.  The second is the first room, which is a rotunda from which the other rooms radiate out.  This year, as last year, it was filled with trash including the odd and garish photo of a glamour model in a frilly white dress.  After wandering around a few times though my eyes began to adjust and I could differentiate the pieces I liked from, well, everything else.

The sculpture was poor and I shall speak no more about them, particularly not the feeble sexually explicit ones. 

There is a strategy I use going round the exhibition.  The trick is to walk through a room one way then another.  Walking around in different directions and different pieces catch your eye.  Some of them reward closer examination but some of them disappoint.  Commercially speaking the show has been a success.  Red dots abound and many of the editions of prints had sold out. 

 I had also done a preliminary research.  The RA have added a very good facility to their website which allows you to peruse the paintings.  There are over 1000 but I went through the first 500 making a note of the artists I like.  Some art works are better in real life, some are worse. Ken Howard for example, good as he is, is much better in photographed form than in real life in my view.

As I went round I circled in the useful catalogue that is given out those works I liked.  It is strangely it reassuring when you keep choosing the same artist again and again.  Gave me confidence in my own taste. 

In room III (turn left off the central hall) you can find Frederick Cuming RA.  Mr Cuming was one of the people who made my list from the prior research, for Stormy Sea but both paintings, particularly the far left (Tennyson Down) are more impressive in person. They have more depth and light.

Terry Setch RA Alabaster and Lights on the Water.  Again from my pre list and again more impressive in person, waxy and three dimensional with a sort of sheen and depth that is appealing.

Bill Jacklin's works are split up in two different rooms. They both have a deep rich quality, a dreamlike view that I really like. They stand out from the works around them and draw you to them in the room. I selected both before discovering they were the same painter

Gordone Chung's El Eelkema I and II are sensibly hung together one above the other.  Chung was not someone who had made my pre-list and again an example of works that have that extra quality in real life.  I like paintings of flowers and the drippy blurred quality against the pitted metallic background really worked for me.  They also compliment each other well, working as a pair.  Both have sold and I hope to the same person.

Hughie O'Donoghue's two pieces Morning afloat (left) and Girl from Stellata (right) really got my attention,  especially the later.   I like the way the figure blurs out of the background and the striking stripe of dark mountain.  Both very good.

Mick Rooney's Bright is the Light (right) and the Kitchen Lighting Orb (left).  The photos here in no way do these justice.  The figures have a frightening fairy quality which comes across a bit in these pictures but is much more effective in the original.  Again the curators have done well and hung them together and they do well as a pair.  I prefer Kitchen Lighting Orb.  The orb has a good internal glow to it (which the photos do not show.

That's it for this week.  The theme I have chosen is those artists for whom more than one work caught my eye.  They are all RA which is perhaps not surprising as they can exhibit as of right and can therefore get more works in than us mere mortals. All in there own way very good works.  I will go onto architecture and others in the next couple of weeks but I will leave you now with Annie Whiles The Areoplane (Largest Dog).  It was amusing to see people do a double take of this and its partner (Smallest Dog) as they went past. I like this.