Summer Exhibition

A couple of weeks ago I finally went to go see the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. I was looking forward to this trip since I had wanted to go last year and I love the idea that any artist can enter their work into this exhibition.  Of course, since any artist can enter their work I was expecting quality to be varied, and I was not disappointed. There was some excellent artwork; my particular favourite was a painting of a treacle jar. I even got a postcard of it, it just looked so realistic and it was obvious the artist had taken so much care over it.

Looking back there was also artwork that I disliked.  To me, some of the paintings were just plain bad quality. However, after reading some of the introduction to The Story Of Art by E. H Gombrich I suddenly realised that I may have been a bit quick to judge on these paintings. When I came to a painting I would look at it, find it in the catalogue and if I liked it I would analyse and think about the painting, if I didn’t like it then I would just gape at the price, say some snide comment to my friend about it and move on. But now I regret not looking at those paintings. Although at first they may not have seemed aesthetically pleasing to me, if I had bothered to analyse it; look deep into the background and wonder why those figures are in the place that they are, I may have come to really like that piece.

In my last post I wrote about how you should stop and think about a painting, but here I was days later being a hypocrite to my own thoughts. I realise now that being analytical about every painting you see is much harder in practice. It takes time to see the potential in paintings you come across, in this summer exhibition particularly as there are so many pieces of artwork around you. Every wall is covered in paintings with different themes and in different sizes. My advice to anyone thinking about attending this exhibition this summer is to go twice. You simply can’t take it all in in one go. My plan is to go again at some point this summer and not look at the paintings that I like, but the ones that, at my first glance, I don’t particularly like. I want to analyse them and think about why I don’t like them. I want to think about the artist and who they are, and what inspired them.

I do recommend this summer exhibition, not because of the amazing art in it but because of the variety of artwork. It could really open your eyes.

The following photo is off the royal academy website. But I want to show what the walls look like in this exhibition.

T 

Stop, and think

Last week I went to an art exhibition at my local university. Obviously, as the show was degree level, I had high expectations. My expectations were not particularly met but I’m not writing here today about that, instead I wanted to think about this one painting that I was absorbed by. When I say absorbed I mean mesmerized, so much that I didn’t even realise the room emptying around me. The first time I looked away I just thought the reason why I had been so gripped in this particular painting, was by the repetition of the thumbprints. I thought it was a bit like op art in the way that the repetition of patterns and lines causes you to stare at it till your eyes go funny. But then I looked deeper into it and realised there was so much more to this painting than I had thought.

 

When you look at it without focusing the thumbprints merge and become lines broken by the white thumbprints, like when you look at text without focusing. The artist (unknown to me) had done every thumbprint with such precision and the lines were nearly, completely straight. I noticed the variety of colour as well. The artist had not used black, grey and white. The white was like eggshell. This colour blended into the wall so well at times that all you could see was the actual thumbprint and no change in colour. The greys and blacks had browns and reds and even some yellow in them. This made every print individual. However, I then noticed that the artist had smudged some thumbprints together, maybe where they had printed one thumbprint too closely next to the other? On the other hand, there were some thumbprints that were far away from their neighbouring thumbprints. Some people might say that the artist was being inaccurate but this is what makes this painting so interesting to me. It feels human. It really feels like someone spent hours trying to imprint their thumb onto the wall, making their mark.

 

It is always nice to find a painting like this. A painting that at first seems so simple but it really has so much more going on. It is a rare occurrence for me to find a painting that makes me think so much and I ‘take my hat off’ to the artist as I only hope that one day my own artwork will make some art student stop, and think, and dream about what the artist was thinking of when they did this piece of artwork. After all, isn’t art meant to be like that?