ANTHONY GREEN. RA. at the Royal Academy London

Looking back with Anthony Green, RA is a treat! 

What a delight and intrigue this installation is! 

Anthony Green, famous for his irregularly shaped canvasses and quirky scenarios of his own middle-class domestic life with his beloved wife, 

has here given us a panoply of his mother's second marriage in 1955, seen thro his own 13 year old eyes. 

Nothing is missed. The silk scarf, handbag, the awful 'modern' fireplace & clock, oval mirror, burgundy eiderdown and fringed waste paper bucket. It is a perfect period piece.  

The gallery/room is full of vibrant, colouful paintings, and eccentric cutouts, little side tables for her watch, lipstick, vase, letters, pink powder puff and hair brush. 

Her ashes are in a pink & white sculptural drum created by Green to replace the screw-top canister he got after cremation. 

The centre piece - a 3D, 3 metre oil, The Fur Coat, features his mother, life size in her actual precious mink coat - then the height of luxury & sign of success. 

Green came to appreciate his stepfather Stanley, a fish merchant who could stand on his head and taught him how to saw. 

I loved everything about this touching, sweet, crazy memorial. It pulls at the heart strings like nothing else. Happily one of the watercolours Embassy Lodge, 1990 is a study for the painting now in Glasgow Museums.  

How lucky mum Madeleine was, to be so loved by her only child and so well remembered and charmingly memorialised. 

Green, RA studied at the Slade and has exhibited at the RA for 51 consecutive years.  His works often use compound perspectives and polygonal forms.  The show celebrates his 40th anniversary as RA. 

The celebration also includes a show at Green's CHRIS BEETLES Gallery in Ryder St, St James's near the RA. 

Here u can get the full force of his amazing paintings with their exuberant, joyous antics and unusual configurations. 

Every detail is there for u to enjoy. A visual feast. 

Here his wife Mary is also celebrated by her husband in paint oozing with affection and total understanding. She is a lucky lady too. 

                                               A total joy. 

LONDON EXHIBITIONS: HOCKNEY< RUSSIAN ART< ANTHONY GREEN

A great week. Loved the DAVID HOCKNEY at the TATE. 

Now he is so popular there have been too many snide comments. He is 80 and full of life, working every day. Thank god for that,

The show is chronological, full of his big hits like his parents, Bigger Splash and Geldzahler etc 

and 

and 

and 

Not enough of his superb drawings - portraits of friends in the 1960s, 

and strangely few of his recent painted portraits from LA. 

However - why carp? The show is exhilarating with its bold colour and experimental videos. Yorkshire landscapes have never looked better.  

Spring Summer Autumn Winter in Yorkshire - a joy. 

via video or paint 

On to the ROYAL ACADEMY for the opening of a huge show of RUSSIAN ART 1917-1932 where folk like Kandinsky and Malevich are buried in a mass of peasants, Lenin and factory workers.

A good deal of ceramic plates and such are included, and are surprisingly interesting. Take a day to see it properly. 

Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 

★ ★ ★ ★ "A voyage of discovery"  Evening Standard

Now, 100 years after the Russian Revolution, which lead to the rise of the Soviet Union, this exhibition brings together painting, film, photography and graphic work, all born out of a period of intense creativity followed by mounting repression. Watch the the exhibition trailer.

Also at the ROYAL ACADEMY is a small gem of a show from ANTHONY GREEN. 

More in a minute - I am off for a coffee!