Brighton Pier Flagpole painting

A couple of days ago - Thursday, in fact - I finished another painting, the one I mentioned at the bottom of my last post.

I decided not to paint the sky all the same shade of blue but stuck with the three bands of colour and kept reworking over the transitions from one shade to another until they blended enough that I was happy with it.

At the last class I'd taken the painting with me to show Kim, the tutor, and to ask for her advice on this particular aspect.  She suggested that I get a Da Vinci pastel brush which is, apparently, like a stencilling brush but less flat on the top and softer.  I should then put some colour on the dry brush, then immediately wipe most of it off onto a cloth.  Then gently use a circular motion over the transitional areas until I get the level of blending that I want.  We looked up the price of Da Vinci pastel brushes online during the class and they were really quite pricey, so I said I already had a couple of stencilling brushes at home and I'd have a go with them first.

So that's what I did and it worked a treat!  Took a lot of circular 'scrubbing' with the brush and made my right shoulder ache like a bastard, and I spent far more time working on this aspect of the painting than any other but I wanted to get it right.  It's not perfect but I'm happy with it.

The next difficulty I had with the painting - although 'difficulty' is a bit strong - is that the building, in reality, is all white, so that meant painting white onto white canvas board, as well as several different shades of grey.  The greys were easy enough to see, but painting white onto white was interesting - the only way I could see where I'd been was to tilt the picture into the light so I could see which parts were shiny from being damp with the acrylic paint.

Anyway, as before, I took a series of photos as I was working on the painting - I find this works as well as standing back to look at it plus it gives me a progress record.  To remind you, this is the photo that I took:

This is the sketch onto the canvas board:

Here I've blocked in the three shades of blue - a pale, sea green colour at the bottom, a more turquoisey sky-blue in the middle, and a darker blue at the top.  I could have used masking fluid to mask off the long thin flagpole itself, as well as the flag, but decided to just be careful:

I decided to start putting in the details of the Union Jack, just to have a break from working in blue:

Then I realised that the white bits on the flag are, in actuality, shades of pale blue-grey because they were mostly in shade, so I was back to working with the blue again!  In the next picture, I've finished the flag, painted the silvery-gold knobble on the top of the flagpole, started painting the flagpole itself as well as starting with some of the grey shading on the building, and also finished blending the transitional blue bits with the stencilling brush:

In this picture I've done more work to the building:

And this is it finally finished off, with all the dark shadows and highlights:

I'm pretty pleased with it, there are some things that aren't quite right but I don't think they're obvious to the casual observer, so now it's time to find the next subject.....

Art Class catch up

I last posted about the art classes I've been taking waaaay back on 1 June, when I discussed facial features and told you that the tutor required us to do a portrait for the last few weeks.  I was thinking about doing one of The Lovely Husband and was umming-and-ahhing over what medium to use.

That was how I left it, yeah?  And then, like I always do, I got a bit slack about keeping y'all updated.  This was because I missed a couple of classes due to life (and hormones, it has to be said) getting in the way, and the tutor postponed another due to her illness.  Also I would just be working on the portrait during the classes and not actually being taught anything specific other than getting general feedback from her about what I was doing.  Which I didn't think would be terribly interesting for anyone else other than me, so I decided not to bore you with it.  Plus it's quite a long time to be working on just one picture and you'd get sick to death with inconsequential updates.  I was, of course, working on it at home in between classes but was having to go slower than I wanted in order to spin it out for the length of the course - I wanted to be able to bring it along to the last class and have a tiny bit left to do so Kim (the tutor) could see how it had gone.

(Does any of that make sense?)

However, because the portrait is now - finally! - finished, I can do one post all about it with the photos that I took at various stages of it.

So, I had to choose a picture of TLH to use.  I was originally thinking that I would get him to pose for a few for me - sleeping on the sofa, standing by the window, that sort of thing - but I knew that was going to be difficult.  I knew he wouldn't really want to do it - even after being with me for 18 years he still gets shy sometimes, and he would've found it excruciatingly embarrassing to have to actually 'pose' for photos even though, bizarrely, he likes having his photo taken.  I thought I'd have a look through my photos of him first to see if there was one that would do.

Very quickly I came across one that I took while trying out my then-new camera, about three years ago.  He was sitting next to me on the sofa and looking sideways at me in a very...I want to use the word 'sardonic' but that's not right...it's the sort of look you give your kid when they're being humorously cheeky.  The sort of look that's a half-grin and might be accompanied with a single raised eyebrow.  Yeah, that sort of look.  It's also an enormous close up, which I liked, basically just showing the centre of the face which is, frankly, the most important part of a face!  This would mean I wouldn't have to get involved with trying to paint hair or clothing thereby making my life easier.  On the other hand, TLH has the face of an almost 50-year old (don't worry, it's his!) and the photo is so large and close up that you see all the different skin tones and discoloration, etc. so I was REALLY going to have to get my head around using colour in order to at least attempt to portray the reality.

I know TLH won't really want me to put the photo up (due to aforementioned shyness) but I can't honestly see how I can discuss the painting of a portrait from a photo without showing you the photo, can I?  (sorry, love....)

The first thing Kim wanted us to do was a preparatory drawing.  This was mine, which I was mightily pleased with:

The photo of the drawing is a little pale so I ran it through a photographic process that makes the darks darker, just so you can see it a little better perhaps:

I have to admit that I liked this pencil picture so much that it got framed and put up on the wall almost immediately!

So, on to the big, colourful version then.  Kim, the tutor, stated that she wanted the pictures to be BIG, at least A3 and, hopefully, even bigger than that.  I rather liked the idea of doing a big painting of a big, closeup photo, so got a piece of canvas board that is 24" x 20", that's 2 foot wide.

I started doing the pencil outline onto the board at class but I didn't take a photo of this.  At home, I continued to sketch in the features, then just decided to go for it and got the acrylic paints out.

First thing I did was to paint the background, which is to the left of the face and was a matt beige colour.  Next I needed to start thinking about skin tone.  The thing with skin tone (and with this photo of TLH in particular) is that there's a lot of yellow-beige in white Western Northern European skin.  So I just added some white to the same beige colour I'd used for the background, and just painted the whole of the face, flat, in that colour as a base.

Next I put in the very dark line of shading down the left hand edge of the face.  In the original photo of TLH, that line is really dark, so I chose the darkest purple I had.  It was a bit alarming after I'd painted it but I decided not to panic - the beauty of acrylic is that you can very easily paint over it once it's dry.

I then lightly painted in the line of the nose, the eyes and the mouth.  I made a BIG mistake in the lip colour and it really looks like he's wearing lipstick but, as with the purple cheek line, I knew I could sort that out a bit better later on.

Starting the eyes came next - I put in the base colour for the iris, and put in the pupil so that I could get the direction of the gaze right.  Eyeballs themselves are never just white, and these were no exception, there was shadow, parts of them were slightly yellow, others very pale bluey-grey and there are tiny veins.  The shadows at the side of the left eye (facing you) I put in by using shades of grey.

Then the skin.  I'd already decided that I was going to use 'pointillism' (i.e., lots of tiny dots - think Seurat), or stippling, to paint the majority of the picture.  Starting with a dark skin shade, I managed to make TLH look like he'd got a particularly disfiguring case of measles.  Plus the fact that I'd not yet done the eyelashes or eyebrows meant he was also suffering alopecia.  Here, see for yourself:

Quite alarming, eh?  And this will give you an idea of the scale of the picture:

Yes, my 'jewellery' room is now my art studio!  I'm using the desk on the right of the picture (which is where I normally do my glass cutting stuff).

I then focused more on the shadows and shading on the left hand side of the painting.  So more beside the eye, down the side of the cheek, under the nose and the corner of the mouth.  Different shades of skin tone were added and the start of creases in the skin (the line leading from the edge of the nose to the corner of the mouth, the filtrum under the nose, the face side of the nostril) were shown by using a denser quantity of dots.  I started tackling the lips by adding highlights and shadows:

I then added the eyebrows, eyelashes, texture and colour of skin in and around the eye sockets and the five-o'clock shadow.  I'm started to add other colours into the skin tone, like ochrey-orange, and places where it's darker red than others:

This is a close up photo of the left eye, you can start to see some of the detail I was putting in, and all the different colours I used:

And that was how it continued, with me adding different skin tone dots, darkening the shadows, adding highlights:

And by finally sorting out the mouth colour and adding the very whitest highlights, the picture was finished earlier this week.  There might not look like a lot of difference between these two pictures and, you'd be right, there isn't but you'll see the mouth is a much better colour now, and the highlights have been added to.  If you click on them, they will embiggen a bit:

Anyway, I'm really glad it all came together in the end and I'm very pleased with the final result as I'd like to think there actually is a bit of a resemblance to my old man.  Kim, the tutor, said she liked it as well, and TLH did too, so, all in all, I'm pretty satisfied.

I've started doing another painting, this time of a photograph I took of a flagpole on Brighton Pier a couple of years ago.  It's a very simple design and quite graphic (in a 'graphic design' sense, not obscenity, I hasten to add!!).  This is the photo:

And this is as far as I've got so far.  Getting the colour to grade nicely from one shade of blue to another is tricky and something I'm working on and am currently wishing I'd just painted the sky all one colour.  I think I might need to take more of the lightest blue right up into the dark blue at the top.  Oh well, I'll see how it goes:

 

And there we are, the full catch up of my art classes this summer.  I've signed on for the next term's classes which will be on Still Life painting and drawing, and start at the end of September.  I promise I'll keep you posted!!

We can but hope...

St. Swithin's Day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St. Swithin's Day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.

Today is St Swithin's Day.  It's sunny here this morning, so let's keep our fingers crossed otherwise we're all going to have to practice growing gills...

Hooray for science! Wooh!

Nasa's Mars rover Opportunity has now been on the surface of Mars for 8000 Martian days (8.5 Earth years) and has recently located a crater.  Today's Guardian has an item about it.  The article talks about how 817 component images have been spliced together, etc., but the picture at the top of the article is so measly that you're inclined to just look at it, shrug your shoulders in a 'meh' sort of way, then click away to read something else.

However, in the comments, some enlightened soul has given the link to the image.  And it's unbelievable.  You can scroll around in the image and enhance it to get detail in the distance.  I'm utterly speechless.

Because I'm sitting on my sofa, at home, looking at the surface of another planet.  The surface of Another Planet.  From my sofa.  By just clicking a few buttons on a keyboard.

We are so living in the future, people, and we don't realise it.

So, my gift to you this endlessly rainy Sunday lunchtime, while waiting for the British Grand Prix to start or Murray to crash out of his first Wimbledon final, is to have your mind blown by clicking on this link and staring in wonder at the surface of another planet.

Hooray for science!  Wooh!

2012 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

The Lovely Husband is between contracts, in other words, an impromptu and slightly unexpected (but welcome all the same) unpaid holiday of a couple of weeks.  Due to the fact that we are the custodians of a creaky old cat who grumps about the place and shouts a great deal, we can't really go anywhere for longer than a day or so.  Plus I don't want to impose cat-feeding duties on friends or family because it's not really as simple as that - he occasionally needs medication for his hobbly, arthriticky old joints but you need to keep an eye on him throughout the day to determine whether he could benefit from a dosing or not, plus there's the horrors of the litter tray and the sweeping up of the cat litter that he flicks everywhere.  And I worry about him so, on the whole, it's easier for us if we don't go on holiday.  Ever again.  Until he goes to his eternal reward.  Which could be years away - although he's 16 now and can't last forever.  *sigh*.

So we make do with day trips from time to time, and this week we decided we'd go to the 2012 Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition.  We didn't go at all last year (can't remember why not), but we did in 2010 and I did a big post about it which you can read here.  Interestingly, that post is the second highest read of all my blog posts with 2,339 views (the highest is the one on How to Make Blackberry Vodka which is still the first result you get back on Google when you enter the title as search terms - it's been viewed almost 10,000 times!)

As it was such a popular post - and I'd received emails from one or two of the exhibiting artists about it (nice emails, I hasten to add!) - I knew I'd have to do another one this time, again with as many photos as I could cram in.  The problem, of course, with that is that I'm breaking all kinds of copyright laws in a very major way which does make me feel somewhat uneasy but, on the other hand, I'm giving the artists free publicity.  And it naturally goes without saying that if anyone objects or complains, then I'll happily take the photo down - I don't want to ruffle any feathers at all or, come to that, get arrested.  So that's my disclaimer out of the way.

Of course, the Royal Academy doesn't actually allow you to take photos because, naturally, they want punters to either buy the painting/print/artwork or the postcards (which I did) or the catalogue, which means I have to employ ninja stealth tactics to get these pictures by using my iPhone which is more discreet than using my 'proper' camera.  The downside to this is that, unfortunately, quite a few of my pictures this year are a bit more blurred and/or out of focus than I would have liked.

The reason for this is that we didn't go on Buyers' Day this year, which is both a good and bad thing.  It was a bad thing because I quite like the snobbery value of being able to mix with the wealthy and the odd famous (i.e., the Marquis of Bath - he always goes on Buyers' Day and he is most definitely  odd and famous) and not to have paid to get in (they send you a free ticket).  It was also a bad thing because it means you don't get first dibs on a piece you might fancy buying (but as I had no intention of buying this year, that wasn't a concern).  It was also, weirdly, both a good and bad thing in that there were far less visitors on a 'normal' day compared to Buyers' Day, when the place is rammed to the rafters and the place gets as hot as a sauna, and you can't see anything properly because you can't get close enough, so less people = a good thing, a very good thing indeed but less people = less bodies to hide behind when taking the illicit photographs.   When I could hide behind people I had the time to be able to focus the phone camera properly and hold it still enough to take some semi-decent pictures; this time there was much less opportunity, so it had to be quick 'n' dirty (as they say, apparently). So that's my disclaimer for the less-than-stellar-quality photos out of the way.

Let's begin, shall we?

We went up on Tuesday (12 June) and decided we would drive.  We've worked out it costs a bit more to drive and park than it does to go by train, but the convenience and the not having to rely on the vagaries of public transport far outweigh the cost.  Not to mention that my feet are playing me up summink dreadful these days and I actually can't walk terribly far without discomfort (yes, this has put the mockers on the running - I really ought to shuffle them along to a doctor....) and just the thought of walking around the RA, then Soho, then to Waterloo, then home from the station was enough to make me weep.

We took the Smart Car, as it's ideal for driving around a busy city and went up the A3 and over Putney Bridge, heading towards a car park on Poland Street in Soho.   The journey up had been quite good so far, but then we went into a tunnel that took us under Hyde Park Corner and became stationary for what felt like ages but was probably only about 10 minutes.  I described the tunnel to TLH as being one of those places in which you wouldn't want to find yourself a couple of weeks after the zombie apocalypse had arrived - you just know it would end badly:

We got through the tunnel unscathed and with our brains uneaten though, so that was alright.

As we went along Park Lane, I noticed the rather fabulous green wall growing up one side of The Athenaeum Hotel:

Driving through the extremely narrow lanes in Soho was, indeed, made much easier by being in such a teeny, tiny car but because everyone else was seemingly driving large white delivery vans we still ended up getting stuck in a tailback down one particularly narrow street for a very long time.  It got very dull very quickly.  Eventually, though, progress was made and we found the car park we wanted.

We parked and while I was waiting for TLH to sort himself out, I noticed these rather fantastic large vintage advertisements that were at the entrance to the car park.  I'm thinking they're probably from the 1960s judging by the typeface:

It was around 12.15pm by now and time for lunch.  I'd had half a mind to try and find a Tapas bar (I've never had it and am keen to try some) but the car park was literally over the other side of the road from Bodean's we decided to go there instead.  This picture isn't one of mine but could well have been taken from the entrance of the car park - we were, indeed, that close to it so it seemed daft to go elsewhere:

Bodean's is a barbecue smokehouse place that does really good pulled pork and ribs, that kind of thing.  Service can be very quick too - I think we were eating within 3 minutes of sitting down:

We had a fair bit of time to kill before going to the Royal Academy - we'd got tickets for a 2.30pm timed entry - so I said I wanted to go to an art supplies shop to get some stuff for art class.  I found that Cass Art supplies were just round the corner and I picked up some acrylic paints that were on sale and other bits and pieces.  Luckily as we were still close to the car park, we could nip back and put them in the boot so we didn't have to carry them round the exhibition - another good reason for driving up.

TLH then said he'd quite like to have a nose around the Apple shop on Regent Street so off we went.  We didn't stay very long because it was full and steaming hot with all the sweaty nerds, and we managed to find ourselves standing close to someone who smelt of wee and unwashed hair, so we made a dash for it out to the - relative - fresh air of Regent Street.  I noticed that the Union Jack flags were still hanging up over the Oxford Street end so went to take a photo, but I don't think it came out very well - a bit too dark and I had to stand precariously on some railings in order to get higher than peoples' heads:

We decided it was time to head off to the Royal Academy so TLH led me down Conduit Street and into New Bond Street where he let me ooh and aah over the amazing sparklies in the jewellery shop windows, and I took a much brighter picture of flags and swanky cars:

We got to the RA at about 2.15pm but they let us in anyway.  There's always a really big sculpture in the front courtyard.  This year's offering was by Chris Wilkinson RA and was a series of large frames one behind the other, pivoted at different angles, called 'From Landscape to Portrait':

It was ok.  My favourite courtyard sculptures, though, were Jake and Dinos Chapman's enormous rusty dinosaurs back in 2007 followed by Barry Flanagan's Nijinski Hares in 2010. 

Up the stairs we went, into the vestibule where they take your ticket and this year, instead of then turning left and passing into Room I, as is traditional, the entrance goes straight into the Wohl Central Hall, an octagonal shaped space.  For this year's Exhibition, the walls of the Central Hall have been painted a fabulous red.

To be honest, I can't recall what order we did the rooms, so I'll just post up the pictures that I took and tell you what I can of them.  Because I was doing guerilla photography, for a few of the paintings that caught my eye I totally failed to get their catalogue number and it's been impossible to work out which one they are afterwards when going through the catalogue, especially if, for example, the painting is of a tin of golden syrup but it's called something like 'Remembrances of Things Past'!  So I'll give info where I can and links to webpages if the artist has one, okay?

For the first time, I believe, the paintings this year have been hung off 'the line'.  Traditionally, 'the line' is the eye height of the average visitor (I imagine somewhere between 5'6" and 6' tall) and is the most prestigious spot to have your picture hung.  In the past, much butt-hurt has been caused by paintings being hung either above or below 'the line', so important has this been.  But this year 'the line' has been transformed into a wave, as you can sort of see in the two pictures below.  I hadn't noticed until just now that the walls have been painted grey, rather than the more usual maroon or dark green, but it doesn't detract from the paintings at all.

The paintings are also less crammed in than normal and while the galleries are still busy, they're not nearly so frenetic, and you don't have to crane your neck back to see the pictures at the top.  I thought it was a massive, massive improvement.  You can also see how much easier it is to actually view the paintings without there being so many people in the way - the galleries were airy and cool, which made for an infinitely more pleasurable viewing experience.

Bear in mind that I have no zoom function on my iPhone camera but if you click the image, embiggening will occur.  I liked so many artworks at this exhibition, far more than in previous ones, and this was the first one that caught my eye - it's an overgrown shed under stormy skies, called 'The Last Retreat' by Lee Madgwick.  I can't say exactly why I like it - I'm a bit of a sucker for hyperrealism in paintings and although this isn't hyperrealist, it just clicked for me.  He had another in the show of an abandoned house with a well-kept garden - it's the first image you see on his website.

In this grouping, I liked the one at the top which has a cut out silhouette in the middle - 'Aldeburgh I - The Scallop' by Anthony Green RA, it'll set you back a cool £12,000.

I really liked this piece, 'Portobello Harbour' by Francis Matthews, not least because it reminded me very much of a photograph (currently pinned to the wall) I took back in the mid-80s while sitting in a car under a railway arch in Clapton, one rainy winter night:

I loved this bright colourful picture but, sadly, haven't got any details for it:

Interestingly there was some textile art this year.  I don't recall there being anything like this at the previous Summer Exhibitions that I've attended so it was great to see them, being as how I'm a bit fond of the fibre.  This was an embroidery by Lara Punch which I liked even though it was a quite straightforward design - I've seen some truly exceptional artwork done with painted silk and embroidery, such as these hand embroidered portraits but, hey, the established artworld has to start somewhere!:

And this was called 'What Remains of La Contessa' by Lynne Brackley and was the top half of an Elizabeth costume knitted over a frame of wood and metal:

I liked this image of a handaxe, mostly because it resonated with my previous life as an archaeologist.  It's been painted on a sheet of aluminium and is called 'Milestone' by Benjamin Clarke:

In this next grouping I particularly liked the picture at the top in the middle.  It's called 'History Paintings: Jones Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum #1' by Kevin Leathem.  If you click on the photo and have a good look, you'll see that the artist has painted the marks and repairs on the beige gallery wall - polyfilla, etc. - and just a corner of another painting:

In this group I was rather taken with the bright pink one that looked a bit like an alien.  Called 'Polypolyphemous', it's by Jennifer Harding:

Tracey Emin has got herself a nice little earner going here; this year she's put in three prints and one large painting.  I'm very, very undecided about our Tracey - most of her stuff I do not like at all, but I do have a soft spot for her bird pictures and the ones she does of Docket, her cat.  So I liked the bird print, 'Small and Beautiful',  that she put in this year, as did everyone else (the red dots equals a sale, at £275 a print):

And I liked it much better than the big painting, 'Upset',  she exhibited, which can be yours for a mere £165,000:

I quite like Michael Craig-Martin's stuff - very graphic (as in design rather than obscenity!), with bright, flat colours, and I thought this large map he did, 'Globalisation', where all the countries are mislabelled, was interesting although I'm not sure what he was trying to say.  Pretty colours though:

This next little batch of four photos are just to show you other pictures, and get a feel for what the rooms are like.  Unfortunately I have no further information for any of them!:

Oh, except now see in this last photo above, that picture in the middle-ish column, at the bottom?  That looks like an open book?  That was utterly fabulous and I'm kicking myself that I didn't get the number or any of the details.  It looks like a Grayson Perry drawing but he's not exhibiting, so I know it isn't.  It's like a medieval anatomical drawing where the organs of the body represent the city of London.  I was having to dodge one of the stewards here but managed to take a photo of the left side of the 'book':

If you look REALLY closely, you can see in the top left plaque it says "From the library of Dr London shewing passage through the capital from it's gullet to it's arse", with a naked figure on the left, eating, labelled 'consumption', and another on the right, squatting and having a poo, labelled 'creation'.  If anyone goes to the exhibition this year, can they let me know who did this?

Also in the picture above, you can see people looking into a cabinet.  One of the items in there tickled both me and TLH.  Again, sadly, I don't have the number or the details so can't tell you much except it's a small cardboard box that has printed on the top "A daily promise - take 1 a day.  Edition 1.  *for the alleviation of daily wretchedness" and it is filled with rolls of paper - a bit like fortune cookie slips - that say things like "I will respond appropriately" and "I will read Proust":

One of things I really liked about the hanging of this particular Summer Exhibition was that, traditionally, the little prints and the 'animal corner' were tucked away in the Large and Small Weston Rooms.  This has always caused a massive bottleneck because these are where the most affordable and popular pieces are likely to be found, and it was was always absolutely horrible trying to elbow your way in and around them.  Dreadful.

This year saw some common sense.  The small pictures were scattered among all the other, larger, works - as were the photographs which have, in the past, had a room to themselves - and the Small Weston Room was given over entirely to a 25-minute trilogy of films set in Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge by Jayne Parker, featuring cellist Anton Lukoszevieze.  The bit of the film that I saw sounded very nice, and I recorded 30 seconds of it:

The Large Weston Room featured a few larger pieces, for example, 'Chicken Chair' by Olu Shobowale, who specialises in making things out of animal bones.  Not sure that this would be all that comfortable, no matter how eye-catching.  Oh, and can you imagine how many cats you'd have to beat away with sticks?:

Behind it on the wall is a very large piece called 'Peg Painting' by Annie Morris.  This is made up of thousands of wooden clothes pegs, each with a cartoon of a naked lady on it.  It kind of reminded me of those drawings of slave ships where the slaves are shown lying on the deck so you can see how they fitted in.  Is the artist here saying women are slaves to domestic chores, I wonder?:

Also in this room was a long thin sculptural piece that was reminiscent of the Elgin marbles mixed with the Bayeux Tapestry but in 3D.  Called 'Sweetly the air flew overhead, Battle with the Unicorns No. 11' by Cathy de Monchaux, it was full of little models of men on horseback and spiky-backed dogs with banners and so forth, all in a big battle scene.  TLH didn't care for it much, but I quite liked it:

As always, there were some gorgeous etchings by Norman Ackroyd RA but I wasn't buying any of his this year:

Also in the same room as the Ackroyds there was a very large portrait of the really rather fabulous actress Tilda Swinton, 'Red but Unread', painted by her husband, John Byrne:

And in front of this, in a case, was a sculpture of the head of David, made entirely from unused matches - 'David (No. 3 of 8)' by David Mach RA:

David Mach was the artist who made the enormous gorilla out of coat hangers that I wrote about in my 2010 Summer Exhibition post and, this year, he's also contributed a life size cheetah also made out of coat hangers.  It's called 'Spike' and will set you back £170,000 and catch on all your jumpers:

Other pictures that I liked that I failed to get any details of are -

An arctic seascape:

Reflections in the water:

I like the red mistiness of this picture - could be a cityscape through early morning polluted mist, hard to tell, but it's dead atmospheric, almost like the start of Blade Runner:

Similarly, I love the light in this middle picture:

In this room, though, I was charmed by this painting of two dogs looking out of windows ('The Underdog' by Oliver Canti): 

And I also liked this painting of an abandoned car slowly being overgrown, another realist picture ('Sleep No. 2' by Covadonga Valdes):

This large robot-like skeleton was particularly eye-catching but, again, I have no details for it:

And I just loved the colours in this huge painting - as must have the Royal Academy itself because this is one of the paintings you can buy a postcard of in the gift shop - 'Buffalo Grill' by Jock McFadyen):

And then there was this bin.  It was placed in such a location that it probably was a bin.  Or maybe it wasn't.  As I approached it, I noticed a well-dressed, besuited middle aged gentleman (the kind who is probably a solicitor) looking down at it.  I stood next to him.  His shoulders were shaking with laughter.  We looked at each other.  We looked back at the bin.  We looked back at each other.   I said to him, "Surely not?"  He said, "Indeed it is - apparently it's a self portrait" and he started laughing again, "...and it's £26,000!".  I said, "Just fancy, you could keep it in the kitchen and put your rubbish in it!".  We laughed a lot.  I guess you had to be there.  But, really, even if this is made from painted bronze and is by a Royal Academician, would YOU pay £26,000 - more than the price of my first flat - for this (and if you would, then I've got this bridge you might be interested in):

There's always one room that's dedicated to architectural drawings and models.  I often find this room overwhelming and, frankly, you can spend as much time in here as in the rest of the exhibition combined if you wanted to have a proper look at absolutely everything so I'm afraid I did just rather swan through here until TLH pointed out this metal hedgehog thing with fibre optics sticking out of it that changed colour.  This is obviously something conceptual but I would be intrigued to see it built, although I don't necessarily like it all that much ('Neuron Pod for Queen Mary University' by Will Alsop RA):

Onwards into the next room then.  The middle of this particular room had lots of small sculptural pieces, and some bigger ones, set on plinths and on the floor.  I understand it must be challenging to display this particular sort of item effectively but I don't think this worked.  It was odd - it reminded me too much of a charity shop, or a jumble sale.  This slightly out of focus photo will show you what I mean (I had to take it quickly, I hid the red-shirted Gallery Steward from my view by positioning the pink crocodile with maiden between us so I only had seconds to take these two pictures):

The next room after this is the one where they've often put the photographs in the past but, as I mentioned above, this year the photos were scattered throughout the rest of the rooms.  There were some big pieces in here, including one that was comprised of a series of gold squares with a representation of a boy's head on the central one, with branches sticking out of his head.  As you do. I did like the swirling wooden sculpture, though:

After this there was another gallery that had some brightly coloured sculptures, and also some carved and polished granite shapes.  There were some 3D geometrical ones in pink and grey granite (you can just see them to the right of TLH's legs in this picture).  I could imagine barking your shin on them would get old very quickly:

Although I did like the swirly flat granite shapes that had sections of different textures.  Must've weighed a tonne, though.  All the granite stuff was by John Maine RA:

And with that, we were done.  We exited through the gift shop - where I picked up a few bits and pieces - stopped off at Laduree for a box of ruinously expensive (but oh-so-delicious) macarons where I received genuine French service from the overly made-up woman behind the till who couldn't bring herself to crack even the slightest smile while she grudgingly put some of these beautifully coloured, jewel-like morsels into a box for me:

(From bottom left the flavours - 2 of each - are Lime & Basil; Blackcurrant & Violet; Strawberry & Poppy; and Salted Caramel).

By the time we got back to the car I could barely walk but we managed to avoid the rush hour and got home within about 90 minutes!

All in all, a fantastic day.  Both TLH and I agreed that this was the best Summer Exhibition that we've been to so far, and I would urge you to go if you find yourself in the neighbourhood.