Two London galleries are currently showing affordable art on a small scale. The Bankside Gallery, next to Tate Modern, is displaying 300 small works made by members of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers and the Royal Watercolour Society. The walls teem with etchings, aquatints, woodcuts, linocuts, acrylics and watercolours, some very tiny – Joseph Winkelman’s delightful etched genre scenes of shops, a lane, a village (£100 apiece) are half the length of your thumb.
Prices of works in this show range from £25 to £2,000. Buy a work, and you can take it away with you: the gap on the wall gets filled with something else. Most of the work is companionably representational, and of a very high standard. There are landscapes, dreamscapes, cityscapes – some very good ones of London by Anne Desmet and John Duffin, for example – still life, portraiture and much else. Lovely, seasonally canny etchings by Anthony Dyson showing prankster angels – one of whom, “The Apprentice” wrestling with a hand press, is a beautiful, meticulous take on a Renaissance master and affordable at £75.

Christmas 2008 

