Feature: Exhibition - Royal Academy Summer Show - showcase for 70 year old couple

Published: 17 June 2010
by DAN CARRIER

IT was a “day job” done during the night that first gave artist Liam Hanley the time to take up the brushes and gaze at an easel.

This week, both he and his wife Hilary have pieces on display at the Royal Academy’s prestigious annual summer show.

The Parliament Hill Fields-based couple (pictured), both in their 70s, had their work selected from more than 11,000 entries to hang at the show, a feat made all the more impressive by the fact neither has an art degree and they are to some extent self-taught. 

Liam’s background is not that of a professional artist, although he has had one-man shows, is represented by the Beardsmore Gallery in Prince of Wales Road and sells his work. Instead, the son of the novelist James Hanley has spent his working life as a newspaper reporter and sub-editor – which meant night-shifts, leaving the days free for him to paint.

His wife Hilary had trained part-time in etchings at the Camden Arts Centre but a job in publishing meant it was merely a hobby until she retired. She now attends classes at the Working Men’s College in Camden Town and the pair have two studios in their home.

At the end of March, they both received letters on the same day – and just before lunch they opened them together, expecting rejection slips. Instead, they were thrilled to discover that two of the four works they had submitted had made the final cut.

“At first we did not know what to do with ourselves,” says Hilary. “We quickly scrapped the idea of having sardines at home for our lunch and treated ourselves to a meal at the pub.”

 “This year, I thought I’d enter the exhibition instead of putting £50 on the dogs,” Liam jokes.

He first submitted pieces in the early 1970s but has not put up his work for many years. 

“I went through a phase where I frankly couldn’t be bothered with all the shemozzle involved – then I found two works that made quite a nice pair, so I decided to enter,” he says.

The competition is fierce: Royal Academicians are allowed to put six pieces in the show – and they are guaranteed to be hung. The remaining 1,000 entries are chosen solely on the foibles of the jury.

“They have to compete for what is not a lot of space,” says Liam.

“The pictures must go past the jury at quite a lick. They reject a lot, but also take on more than they can hang, which means they can change them if they want. And they hang them so the place is packed, floor to ceiling.”

It is the culmination of around five decades of honing his style – without ever having a formal lesson.,

“As a child I would do copies of the Old Masters and architecture, but I never thought of art school,” he says. His mother’s love of art meant he had gone to exhibitions, and it was when he was put on the night shift at the Western Mail he was able to spend his days painting and looking at shows. A move to London to the News Chronicle in the 1950s gave him more time, and he even signed up for a course at the Central School of Art – although he admits that after a long night-shift in a news­paper office, his mind was not on his studies. 

Hilary’s work very nearly wasn’t sent at all. The theme of this year’s show is Raw, and she didn’t think she had much chance of being selected as her piece,  she says, was “too polite”. “I had chosen two other pieces originally when we both decided we would apply,” she says. “But it is very hit and miss and the chances of you getting in are very slim. Then I woke up and decided ‘blow it – I’ll put one of my bigger etchings in’. I thought, there is no way they will select it any way, so I may as well go for one of my bigger works.”

The judges eventually chose Liam’s piece called Oak, and Hilary’s, etching of a dark and churned up field. “I felt both had a  ‘raw’ sense to them,” says Hilary, a judg­ment the esteemed curators at the RA obviously agree with.

• The Summer Exhibition runs until August 22 at the Royal Academy, Piccadilly, W1, 020 7300 8000, www.royalacademy. org.uk

• A full review of the Summer Exhibition will appear next week