One morning (with strawberries)

One Morning (A4 mixed media 2016)

The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition comes in for a fair bit of stick. It rarely gets reviewed in the weekend broadsheets and if anyone pays it any notice at all, it’s to give it a hard time. Seen until recently as rather conservative and dominated by older, male artists, the RA invites anyone to enter works for the Summer Exhibition: this year 12,000 submissions were received but only 700 works by non-Academicians were accepted.

The 2015 exhibition was stylishly curated by Michael Craig-Martin, whose own work I find rather sterile despite photographer Richard Guest’s shedding welcome light on it earlier this year. This year’s was left to the care of Richard Wilson and, if not as ground-breaking as it was under Craig-Martin, there’s still plenty to admire.

Among the less showy numbers was a small painting by Karolina Gacke, an artist whose name is new to me. Despite the presence of bigger names – including a particularly wobbly print by Tracey Emin of a woman doing something or other on a hotel bed and some vibrant prints by Jim Dine – I kept wandering back to this still life by Ms Gacke, looking at it hard and long for some time.

It’s been an uninspiring couple of weeks, I have to admit, but long after I left the Royal Academy Karolina Gacke’s lovely painting remained with me. Over the weekend I had a go at her spacious, loose style. Although my painting is more contrived, I present it here as a tribute to someone who, for me, stole the show at the Royal Academy this year.

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