Gaze – Sarah Berman
Last week I saw the Royal Academy 2023 Summer Show and enjoyed it hugely.
I must have been in a receptive mood that day because the joy of everyone making art, such beautiful art, really touched me.
Walking through rooms beautifully prepared to colour harmonise with carefully curated art was just delicious.
I go to galleries a lot but this quenched a thirst I didn’t realise I had and I think it’s because (to some degree) the Summer Show is an Everyman show; a chance for the unsung and unseen to have a moment in the spotlight and that’s inspiring in itself.
But also because there was such a breadth of styles, approaches and use of media – it was like a buffet table of goodies to pick at and devour.
I got such a lot of composition, colour and style notes from looking at all these pieces.
Ann Oram All Things Are Connected
The people who select works for the rooms in the show do a superb job of finding connections through colour, mood or subject matter.
The sum total of the whole grouping of pieces becomes an art form in itself.
And I love to find some unwitting person who colour co-ordinates with a wall!
Good Vibrations – Annie Folkard
It isn’t all painting or print – there’s textile art, sculpture and architecture too.
If Only He Could talk – Christina MacDonald
I love mini scenery (model villages, railway sets etc) so I really enjoyed the architectural building mock-ups.
In one way its almost over whelming that there is so much art being made and in another it felt like a invisible club made visible for a time – all these people making their way through life making art as the result of some deep need to create.
Paul Dash– Bacchanal
I love discovering new to me / contemporary artists and its really my main motivation in using social media (Instagram in particular) because my feeds are made up of the inspiring and educative.
Gregory Olympio (top) Mali Morris (below) who is showing at Icon, Birmingham till December 2023.
A show like this offers a wealth of discovery that I can ‘follow’ and looking and noticing aspects of another’s practice has a drip-drip feed into things I try in my own art-making.
I did come home and the very next day paint a still life, something I’ve not done in a little while, and I call that ‘proof in the pudding‘!
John Maine
Next post will be about what inspired me and why. Thanks for reading x
