The Summer Exhibition
Royal Academy of Arts, until 22 August
The Weston Room is packed with prints as usual, but also features five display cases of artists’ books, including work by such masters of the genre as Ron King, Ken Campbell and Ian Tyson. Among the prints I particularly liked Bronwen Sleigh’s hand-coloured etching, Terry New’s digital print, Cornelia Parker’s etched worry lines, the screenprints of Stephen Chambers, Eileen Cooper’s linocuts, Ivor Abrahams’s ‘Suburban Totem’ and etchings by Paula Rego, Frank Auerbach, John Carter, Peter Freeth and Eileen Hogan (a pale beauty of Bryanston Square). The Small Weston Room is a typical feast of tiny paintings, and supremely popular with the buying public. Here are such old favourites as Diana Armfield and Bernard Dunstan, both 90 this year and still going strong, and a trio of Elizabeth Blackadder still-lifes. Several larger paintings, such as Derek Balmer’s autumn birchwood and Mick Rooney’s bewitched food-oriented tableaux, help to make sense of this room. Among the smaller works I spotted through the crowds: Alf Stockham’s ‘House and Boats, Dingle Peninsula’, Frank Tinsley’s ‘Tug, Portishead’ and ‘Manchuria’ by Gus Cummins.
Gallery III is sparely hung and all the more effective for it. The prestigious end wall is given over to Gillian Ayres this year, whose five glorious paintings lift the heart with their unabashed decorative vigour and add unremittingly to the sum of human happiness. By rights, she should have won the £25,000 Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the exhibition, but no doubt Yinka Shonibare’s ‘Crash Willy’ accorded more with the judges’ fashionable directions. To the left of Ayres hang a couple of John Wragg’s tough figurative acrylics, to the right six gouache portraits by Humphrey Ocean.
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