Saturday 18 February 2017

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. 


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