Buying prints at the RA
Published on 4 July 2022
Alongside this year's Summer Exhibition, you can also find several free displays across our buildings – each showcasing artworks ready to bring home. Here are three highlights, chosen by print enthusiasts.
From the Summer 2022 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.
Norman Ackroyd RA: Hebrides
Novelist Sebastian Faulks says: "I have always loved Norman’s work – including this one, Sula from St Ronan’s Chapel. Etching en plein air is at first glance a slightly dotty thing to do. And, I imagine, a considerable challenge of weather and skill. But it seems to work for him, this balance of the studied and momentary. Contradictory elements are key. These far-off places, seen through Norman’s eyes, are desolate but hopeful. Imposing, yet modest. They are of a pre-human age and grandeur, yet they benefit from being seen, touched and almost, but not quite, inhabited. We are lucky to see them through his eyes."
Mali Morris RA: Mardi Gras etc
Curator Ingrid Swenson says: "Mali Morris’s musical tastes are broad. On a recent visit to her sun-filled studio, Bach played. She also has a particular love of jazz. Printmaking is a more collaborative and measured activity than painting. But still, both in the artist’s production of the work, and our subsequent encounter with it, pure pleasure is achieved in the layering of registers between the gestural and the geometric, the harmonious and the dissonant, or what she refers to as ‘improvisation and strategy’. Syncopation resonates throughout to create works, such as this screenprint, Staith, that are modestly exuberant, generously economic, and encountered at the very moment of resolution. Play on."
Contemporary Japanese Prints
RA Art Sales head Alison Acampora says of one of the included artists: "I am relatively new to the prints of contemporary artist Kazuyuki Ohtsu but I feel as if I have been acquainted with his work for some time. Having grown up with Japanese woodblock prints at home and having visited Japan, for me there is a certain familiarity in the scenes his works depict. And yet somewhere between the soft, velvety grain of the surfaces and the vivid green glow of moss (as in this one here, titled Kyoto – Daisen-in), or beaming golden yellow of ginko leaves, there is a freshness to his work. Less known to me, entirely enticing. Ohtsu’s prints are seemingly simple, yet unmistakably skilled – steeped in decades of expert printmaking tradition and technique."
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