stolen-image

I’ve just completed an entry for the 2026 Royal Academy Summer Show. A tortuous process, which is getting easier over time, it has to if they want to take the 18,000 entries at £40 a time ( yes that’s £720,000 ) and select up to 4000, in the first round of judging, then they are whittled down further to around the 1000 that will go on show. If you are an academicians, ie you have RA after your name, you can exhibit work automatically, well it is their club.

Now I will have to wait till the 18th of March to see if my work has got passed stage 1. It is called “room 8”, and features room 8 of the 2024 summer show, which as it happened held a work by Anna Alcock that year. Called “The Bathers” it was a reworking of Cézanne’s “The Bathers”, an historically significant painting that Cézanne worked on for 7 years and was still left unfinished at his death. Its influence on Picasso can be seen in his “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”.

In Anna’s hands “The Bathers” is reimagined and inspiring , “Les Grandes Baigneuses” have moved to the Hampstead Ponds, and become a celebration of womanhood, a festival of the feminine, in Anna’s image of women they are interacting at peace, supporting each other.

Anna, Isabella, and Joshua all appear in my picture because it was taken on an “exhibitors day”, when we all went see the exhibition, and Annas work hanging there. A grand day out, exploring the bars and backrooms of the refurbished building. The picture was first assembled later in the year, fully coming together the following year, before being lost when my hard drive fried. I managed to recover it, at some cost, and thought I would submit it as I wanted to see Anna in the RA again. I had missed the 2025 exhibition deadline when the places had all sold out, so here we go for 2026.

Fingers crossed all around.

I forgot to paste this up before Christmas, well before Christmas as it happens, but life interveined. I had been thinking about the way the world works and how to comment on it. In particular the way some countries get away with atrocities because of the strangest attachments to people in power. In many ways opposition to the powerful can start with laughter, it will never overthrow them, but it is a useful starting point, laughing at their absurdity, realising there are chinks in their power that we can open by other means.

Behind it all is money, predominantly at the moment, money invested in oil, and the games the rich play to stay hold on to it and get it. But the power struggle seems to play out on more superficial levels, more personal and humanly relatable. Thats is where the cartoon level of investigation starts, starts not stays, so I thought I’d have a go.

I have always likes the work of South Park, the mix of cutout and drawn animation, so I though I would try something in that style. The bully of the west Donald Trump, throws his power around seemingly without opposition from governments that should know better. And yet two relationships he has, that with Putin in Russia, and Netanyahu in Israel, seen to refute that power, as if they have a hold over him.

So here it is a 3min animation “The Negotiator”: