2 March 2019
In this year’s RI show three of my long still life paintings of nests, mallets and shells will be hanging together. I’ve written about the nests in a previous blog, Nesting. The other two seem to be polar opposites – while the mallets, below, are dense and heavy, the shells, above, are delicate and light. The mallets are bashed and heavily marked, while the shells are pristine and intricately patterned. The mallets dominate their picture and are restricted within a box-shaped shelf. The shells are on an open shelf. Painting two rather opposite subjects wasn’t an intentional thing – it just turned out that way – but it’s interesting looking at it retrospectively. It shows how objects seem to determine the way you place and approach them even if they are all in a line! Perhaps they will play against each other in the show. It’ll be interesting to see.
The RI show at the Mall Galleries, London, is open from 3 – 18 April (10am – 5pm) and all the paintings can be seen by clicking on this link and scrolling down. I am delighted that my painting, Archive, is on the front cover of the catalogue – it is being auctioned to raise money for the restoration of the RI Archive, recently housed at the V & A museum. It also features on the back cover of the new RI book, Then and Now, being launched at the show and including a foreword by HRH The Price of Wales, a history of the RI since its inception in 1831 and features on all its current members. It’s a long- awaited publication with over 170 beautifully illustrated pages.
