Another lovely day
Friday, August 19, 2016 at 10:24AM
It was an early start but I didn’t mind one bit, because at just gone 9.30am we were sitting in our favourite seats on the top deck of the number 452 bus.
First stop was my favourite OSKA shop where the new season collection is in. Not that I felt much like buying woolly clothes and warm Winter trousers yet. Still, it’s good to see what’s around and identify a few nice things
Our aim for the day was the Royal Academy, where the Summer Exhibition is in full swing and a separate, intriguing David Hockney show is running too.
Neither gallery was too crowded to get a good look at things though it was easy to see why the David Hockney show is on timed tickets. Not quite so much room in there.
It didn’t take us long to identify our favourite pieces of work in the show and an early contender was this clever painting on rough, recycled timber which cleverly utilised the join and the characteristics of the grain to create a wonderful background to some simple but effective painting. Sadly, way, way out of our budget, but we can all look and admire, can’t we?
The room of architectural art struck a chord with us both and I especially liked this 3D map. Difficult to photograph in a way which explains the fun of the piece, as each location was marked with a small “signpost”, way too small to read…
but thankfully not too small to photograph!
Also in this room were some stunning architectural drawings, both of the neat and accurate, blueprint ruler and pencil kind but also of the highly skilled, fast and furious thick black marker sort. My favourite was by Norman Foster – so clever! In the corner, though, was this assembly of small paper constructions, apparently random folds and shapes but for me, very appealing (it did nothing for my Hero). I caught my self thinking “I could do that” (but of course, I probably couldn’t <g>)
One thing is always interesting to observe: the hanging. Clearly, there are way more pieces of art to hang than in a normal exhibition and displaying the exhibits in broad themes was one way of achieving a coherence of sorts. Each room had been hung by a different artist, however, and this, the landscape room was especially interesting. On each wall was a line of smaller works like this one by the door, together with another separate but complementary arrangement. But who’d have thought of putting that one right up there, high above the others? Or the little one out on a limb near the corner? Intriguing.
The large statement piece presented on a set of doors clearly chimed with many and had been selected for reproduction on one of the postcard selections. Powerful words, I agree. But going back to the hanging of the pieces, look at that little orange and red piece up there on the wall. Would you have hung that there?
As you can imagine, we had plenty to talk about even before we viewed the David Hockney (sadly no photographs in those rooms). Clever, clever man! The Royal Academy page about the exhibition is a rich source of background information about the man and these works so rather than say any more here, I’ll simply say, we loved it!
Reader Comments (2)
I'm glad to see you've written about the Hockney exhibit. Several members of our tour are going in mid-September.
I've had the book on the Hockney exhibit on order since I heard about it. It came today and the book is amazing! The portraits are all there, of course but the support info is really spectacular. I started and just kept reading, it's a great read.