Last Week

I got no work done last week . On Monday Buddy K and his wife, Susy Sue, drove Patsy123 and me down to Wokingham in their car and we spent most of the week with them.

Wokingham's relatively handy for London, but the rail fare's a bit of a bugger, so my new Senior Rail Card came in handy. It made it less painful to travel into town to take a look round Tate Britain and later, to see the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

The show being hyped at Tate Britain is Hockney on Turner Watercolours. It's a bit of a come-on, actually, in that only one room of the show has been curated by David Hockney and there's nothing much to say why he chose the watercolours he did. But as I'd read that in a review previously, and because it's always a delight to look at Turner's watercolours (especially the recently purchased "Blue Rigi"), I didn't mind.

Hockney has some giant watercolours of his own associated in an obscure sort of way with the Turners (the "association" being that they both used watercolours), but not signposted in any way that I could see. It was only as we were leaving, having discovered a lovely Prunella Clough retrospective, that we noticed the Hockneys hanging on the walls of a stairwell off to one side.

There are five of them, each composed of several panels, depicting the same wood at different times of the year. I still have difficulty with Hockney's very strong, almost strident colours (especially his reds and greens of course), but after a short while I warmed to these pictures.

There's an even bigger Hockney painting in the Summer Exhibition. It takes up one end wall of Room III and is painted in oil on 50 canvases. Up close, it looks a bit iffy. It's of a wood again, the trees without leaf, and there are obvious discontinuities between one canvas and the next, both in terms of branches and their colour.

Once you get to the other end of the gallery, however, those imperfections become irrelevant, and the work takes on a genuine grandeur. I realise that scale plays a large part in this kind of effect, but I think Hockney has made a remarkable piece here.

As for the rest of the show, it was mostly very enjoyable. There are always things that I don't like - I failed to be moved by newly-elected Academician Tracey Emin's neon squiggle, for example. In fact I thought it quite pathetic, but really it's not fair to single her out on the basis of her unwarranted celebrity status.

And as for Gavin Turk's "Dumb Candle" ... A candle carved from a sawn-off piece of broom shank. This was given the Charles Wollaston Award of £25,000 for "the most distinguished work in the exhibition." Distinguished? It is to laugh.

Bill Woodrow, who chaired the judging panel, apparently said: "Dumb Candle is an imaginative work with subtle undertones that pick up on several significant art historical moments. The simple candle form is one of the oldest symbols of life.''

Bollocks.

But these are minor grumps. There are more than enough good, interesting paintings, prints and sculptures to make up for the Usual Establishment Suspects.

RAgbag

I got into London on Monday with enough time to take in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, though humping my bag through hot and sweaty London streets, given my current limp, was not a lot of fun.

I can't say the Exhibition was a lot of fun, either, though it had its moments. The usual ragbag really, but the Academicians seem to be taking over the place. Considering the show was set up to allow open submissions from the country, it pisses me off when the RAs decide to load it with their own works and invite "Honorary" RAs from abroad to show too.

There were the expected delights in the Small Weston Room, where very small pictures by your average Joe are skied alongside better-known names like Craigie Aitchison and Jane Corsellis.

The Large Weston Room was also good, being given over to prints as usual. It always fascinates me to see which subjects are given the long line of red dots treatment. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see more red dots on an etching of a cute grey seal than on a colossal woodcut of Zeppelins attacking London.

In Gallery V David Mach had found a good use for hundreds of postcards of the Clotheshorse Princess. He'd cut up lots of Diana postcards, as well as others depicting fruit, grapes etc, and collaged them all together to form a reclining nude called "Princess."

Tom Phillips presented a typically idiosyncratic arrangement of 40 sheets of Minutes from RA meetings on which he'd doodled quite exquisitely.

Drawing seems to be making a comeback. Gallery VI was stuffed with them, many very good indeed. I don't include in this the two Tracey Emin monoprints of quite extraordinary ineptitude. I begin to think she may be dyslexic. But as Patsy123 puts it, while dyslexia should not be a barrier, it should also not be an excuse for lack of ability. Anyone unknown presenting such dross would have no chance of having it accepted.

Emin's crap was more than made up for by a beautiful Dennis Creffield charcoal drawing of Skenfrith Castle, Alessa Avelino's New York Drawing 1, Mary Fedden's two unfashionably precise pencil drawings, and On the Moors, a lovely poetic semi-abstract landscape in pencil, acrylic, oil stick and chalk by Victoria Petterson-Turner.

Too much to go into in any more depth. There was a huge polychrome sculpture of an owl in one gallery. Must have been 15 feet high. "No dear," said one deaf old lady in a loud voice to her equally deaf old friend, "it wouldn't go in my sitting room."

Anthony Whishaw, whose work I've always looked forward to, disappointed me by producing pictures in what I took to be simply black and white acrylic. Then Patsy123 pointed out how he'd painted over a heavily textured red underlayer which gave a fascinating effect apparently Not to my red/green defective vision, unfortunately.

There was some kind of function on that night, so we were thrown out at 5.30.

Time to shuffle and drag ourselves through the crowds outside to a pub with no beer, where we'd arranged to meet the Big Dave, True Rat, Buddy K and Suzie Sue. The Expected Welshman wasn't able to make it. Then on to an excellent meal at a Turkish restaurant. Lamb shanks all round, despite True Rat's suggestion that it might be Cockney rhyming slang for something offensive.