The Summer Exhibition Is Better Hung Than Usual

You're not permitted to take photographs inside the Royal Academy, but the gallery watchdogs made an exception in my case when I went round the Summer exhibition this evening. As everyone I bumped into seemed to have a painting stuck up on the walls, the guards didn't strongly object when I snapped them plonked in front of their work.

Two artists who had red stickers daubing their paintings were Peter Clossick and C. Morey de Morand, who had two big paintings in the show. One of them ('Inside Outside') had the good fortune to be hung above a 'crap' Tracey Emin pic. People would look at it, raise their eyes heavenwards in disbelief (the £90,000 painting had been sold), then with relief, feast their eyes on Morand's colourful canvass.

Peter Clossick's painting was titled 'Santon II" and when I gushed how much I liked it, proceeded to give me a crash course in history of art, by telling me he collects Santons which were produced during the French Revolution when churches were forced to close and their grandiose nativity scenes forbidden.

Morand's pics attracted her colourful admirers: Michael Davis, photographer Lorenzo Poccianti (who took the snap of Morand in front of her 'Invisible Lives' pic), (Lady) Henrietta Rous, (author of the 'Ossie Clark Diaries'), and a visual work of art, who went by the name of Pinktessa, an ex-Blitz kid 'multi-medium' artist who looked like she had stepped out of the the late French eighteenth century herself, due to her elaborate white hair which resembled a wig from that period.