ROYAL SOCIETY OF MARINE ARTISTS - SMELL THE CHOCOLATE!

Yesterday I made my third successive visit to the opening of the annual show of the Royal Society of Marine Artists (RSMA), which runs at the Mall Galleries this year until 28th October.

I wasn't surprised, but I was disappointed: the two large gallery halls were once again crammed to the gunwhales with saccharine scenes of fishing boats in picturesque harbours; nearly all the work figurative; some maybe adventurously impressionist; one piece so dangerously abstract that the Society's President, David Howell, told me he had to argue hard for its inclusion (but it didn't seem that abstract to me).

Now I can't complain about what a private club chooses to put in its collection, but I can feel sadness that, from all that I understand the maritime to be, this is the only way it gets imaged in a prestigious society's annual show.

As a whole, the work was cloyingly passive; most seemed to have been done by people visiting the sea, rather than being on it; the easel having been placed at an easy carrying distance from the car boot.  We all know of the lengths the Dutch master William van de Velde the Elder went to in putting himself amongst the action, and of the dynamic sketches he made in appalling weather and battle conditions.  Where were the spray-stained sketches in this show?  I couldn't smell the salt;  the only smell I got when I scratched the surface of this work was the chocolate from inside the box.

The Selection Committee must take responsibility for all this, and for whittling what David told me were over 700 entries to the 276 on the wall.  Please be assured that each member of that committee was generously represented on the walls, averaging 4 works from each of them.   Here, without naming the individuals, are samples from all seven of them:

Boats on the sea shore, Worthing

Hazy Light - Scarborough

Fishing Vessels in the Outer Harbour - Staithes

A King's Ship

British and Commonwealth Aircraft Carriers at the Coronation Fleet Review

The Packet 'Mutine' off Pendennis Head

Off Shore Breeze, Porthtowan

I think you get the drift.  The subject-matter is utterly predictable: fishing boats; windjammers; fishing boats; battles at sea; fishing boats; beach scenes; lifeboats being brave; more fishing boats, umpteen Venice canal scenes,  - and this year in pride of place, some reference to the recent pageant on the Thames (submitted by a loyal member of the selection Committee).

David assured me that what was on the wall was representative of what had been submitted: "You can't select work that's not submitted", he said.  I just don't accept that: whilst I am sure that the high technical standards demanded were often not met by entrants, I also suspect (no - I know) that stuff of real dynamism and edginess was also rejected.  Maybe it will be hung some day in a kind of Salon des Refusés (even Manet might have been thrown out by this lot). 

The work seemed to be without narrative.  We were hardly given a taste of what it is like actually being at sea, on a middle watch maybe, or gutting fish like Redmond O'Hanlon on the after deck of a trawler maybe, or cleaning cruise ship cabins maybe; instead we were just told what it looks like on sunny day when the light is good; time after time after time. 

I was pleased to see some work which imaged the real business of the sea today, without the bravery or the derring-do, and for me one of the best was Richard Cave's The Buoy Transporter (below), very much in the vein of that contemporary French 'peintre de la marine' Dirk Verdoorn, whose huge canvases of working ships, rust and all, hang in the Galerie de l'Estuaire in Honfleur.

I have long thought that the photographic work of the American artist-scholar Allan Sekula has marked a paradigm change in how we might image the maritime.  Sekula is aware of, and is not at all nostalgic about, the fact that 'our gaze has moved away from the waterfront'. What this means is that we no longer see ships and docks in our city centres, and our work generally does not associate with sea trade.  But Sekula knows that the business of the sea continues, but out of sight - in the container parks, the scrap-metal yards, the demolition beaches of Alang, and hidden behind those firmly barred thresholds to the crew's quarters in modern cruise ships.  Look at his collection of photographs in Fish Story to see how the maritime can be imaged.

Not only is the subject matter of the work in this show overwhelmingly conservative, but so too is the mode of representation.  David Howell seems to think that the maritime can only be represented figuratively: "There it is - it's out there", he told me, "how can you be abstract about the sea?"  At this stage I was pretty certain that even Munch's Scream (as close to the water as much of the work on show) would also have got a disgusted thumbs-down from the selection panel.  Our conversation was tense by now, so I didn't think it was appropriate for me to give this honest gentleman the condensed story of the rise of abstraction since 1850 that I give to my second year students.  I hadn't finished counting the fishing boat scenes. 

As with the 2010 show, the best work on the wall in my view was in the 'Young Marine Artists' section, tucked away in the smaller room.  No - I'm not patronisingly saying 'let's encourage the next generation' - it was really the best work in the show!  I speak in particular of David Cass's two pieces: an oceanscape painted on the seat of a stool (Untitled Ocean, below), and a pair of seascapes on matchboxes.  The subject might be the same, but the originality of presentation stood out against the monotony of the rest of the exhibition.

Sadly, I predict the same general sort of stuff from this show next year.  As David Howell remarked, it takes time to make changes.  In any case, this outfit is too entrenched in its views to even consider changing its ways.  But, to avoid similar criticism in future, the RSMA must widen its selection procedure to include some people on the panel who know their contemporary art, and who don't have an interest in hanging their own work.  Your correspondent, for one, is volunteering.

This material except images copyright Thom Gorst 2012.