The power and the glory

Taking the train from Paddington to Bristol can be hazardous if you coincide with an exodus of holidaymakers on summer excursions. I travelled down on a Thursday morning and the Paignton express was not only packed to the gunnels (if trains can rightly be said to have gunnels), but even picked up more passengers en route. But the effort was very definitely worthwhile: in the superb top-lit galleries of the Royal West of England Academy is a glorious show of paintings by the RWA’s president, Derek Balmer (born 1934). Here are paintings of place coursing with rich colour, evocations of foreign travel and the landscapes of home, cities and fields endorsed with the traces of man — a history of civilisation in the making.

Balmer’s retrospective starts in 1950, when he began to attend the West of England College of Art, and, as he says, ‘came home’ after a rather disjointed childhood.