March 22nd, 2023

​How Does It Feel to Get Shortlisted For the Royal Academy

The Royal Academy in a building built in 1772 in Piccadilly London.
​A place that has been nurturing art students for over 250 years.  Annually they run an open art competition, called the Summer Exhibition.

The brand Hole and Corner writes an article about this very subject and see Being accepted into the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition is seen by many artists as an indication that you have ‘made it’ in the art world.  Each year a Royal Academician member co-ordinatesthe exhibition, this year David Remfry RA; and he has chosen to explore the theme Only Connect, taken from the famous quote in Howards End by E.M. Forster.

This year the exhibition will run from 13th June to 20th August 2023

The application process is highly organised. If you get through the digital submission stage (attracting about 20,000 submissions) there is a long short-list (1,500) of works that they want to see in the flesh.
During the early part of May, Piccadilly is filled with artists with work under their arm and Burlington Gardens with vans with art onboard. 

I was sitting in my studio when I received the e-mail saying that I had been shortlisted.
I was very excited, pleased and proud.

Original painting called, Resting Through, water-based oil on linen

What is the painting about?
​
Victoria is currently exploring themes of identity: what it is to be a woman, a mother, a sister, a daughter, a homeowner, a home-maker. What do these titles mean and how do they manifest themselves in our lives? 
 
Through an earlier training in psychology and psychotherapy Victoria explores what it means to have a sense of self, and how it manifests itself in the world we create around us. These observations touch not only on issues of self-understanding but also heritage and history, and the incomplete and subtle ways in which knowledge is handed down from one generation to the next. 
 
In Victoria’s work this sometimes appears (or disappears), leading to questions about whether the image is representing something from current reality: observation – or from personal or hand-me-down (collective) memory: imagination. Victoria’s paintings of the last 18 months depict fragments of familiar domestic environments often devoid of people to make physical the momentary sensation of the familiar which is often overlooked and to make it considered, noticed, and thought about.