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.