A tour of RWA’s current exhibitions

Our three current exhibitions – Inquisitive Eyes, Imagined Landscapes and Simon Quadrat PPRWA – are all very different, yet there is a strong uniting theme: the artists’ responses to landscape.

Inquisitive Eyes documents a pivotal place and time in British art, when painters including Augustus John, William Orpen and John Everett congregated on Dorset’s Isle of Purbeck in the years before WW1, resulting in a ‘school’ arguably as significant as those at St Ives or Newlyn. My favourite work from the exhibition has to be Augustus John’s Blue Pool, which comes to us on loan from Aberdeen Art Gallery. It depicts an elegant, strikingly dressed woman lying beside a turquoise lake, edged by chalky cliffs, her bright yellow book lying closed in her hand as she stares into the distance, lost in her own thoughts.

Although this was painted in Dorset, the model’s Eastern-inspired outfit and the clear influence of post-Impressionism on John’s style gives it a far more exotic feel: it could be Morocco or the Côte d’Azur. We’ve chosen this image as the poster image for the show, and its power is clear when you see it blown up to near billboard size: but the painting itself is modest, the kind of work you can very much imagine on your wall at home.

What I love about the exhibition as a whole is the incredible breadth of work, from William Orpen’s powerful, almost photorealist portrait of Augustus John, to Vanessa Bell’s modernist take on a view of Studland beach. The curator, Gwen Yarker, has done an amazing job – first in unearthing this ‘lost chapter of British art’ and then in selecting paintings that so graphically demonstrate how the battle between traditionalism and modernism was fought out by a group of friends on one beach in Dorset.

Sitting alongside this exhibition is another beautifully curated show, Imagined Landscapes, brought together by Gemma Brace (RWA Exhibitions Curator) and Dr Iain Biggs RWA. A companion exhibition to Inquisitive Eyes, this exhibition explores an alternative understanding of place in contemporary art and the role of the artist as spatial narrator, cartographer and geographer. Again, the quality and breadth of the show is superb, and whatever your taste in art, there’s sure to be at least one artist whose work you’ll love.

One of my personal favourites is Gill Rocca, whose dream-like, misty imaginary landscapes take you out of the gallery and into a place of dreams and memories. Exquisitely painted and clearly crafted over many hours, they hide the labour of their creation as they have a timeless quality that makes them look like they have somehow always existed.

The third of the shows is a small solo exhibition of Simon Quadrat’s work. A former President of the RWA (like the Royal Academy in London, the RWA has Academicians, elected by their peers), Simon paints using a very personal visual vocabulary that harks back to his youth in London. Full of humour and intrigue, his paintings ask more questions than they answer, hinting at stories that the imagination is free to develop and I can envisage losing myself for hours gazing at a work and pondering its meaning.

My favourites change on a daily basis, but the one I currently want to take home is Simon’s take on an Annunciation, with a be-suited Angel Gabriel looking like he is selling insurance to a slightly reticent Mary in a stark industrial landscape. Fortunately for anyone falling in love with the paintings, most of the works in Simon’s show are available for purchase, and the Arts Council supported Own Art scheme means that there’s an option to spread payments over ten months, interest free: the hard bit is deciding which one to choose!

Inquisitive Eyes: Slade Painters in Edwardian Wessex, 1900-1914, Imagined Landscapes and Simon Quadrat PPRWA are at the RWA until Sunday 12 June. For more info, visit www.rwa.org.uk/whats-on

Pictures 1 and 3 above: credit Alice Hendy