My Week: Dan Stevens - Telegraph And so we finally wrapped on Summer in February, a film based on Jonathan Smith's beautiful novel about a tragic love triangle in an artists" colony in 1913. This week it became the first ever feature to be allowed to film in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts, where one of our triangle, Alfred Munnings, eventually became president. Munnings fell out of favour with the RA when he dismissed so-called "modern artists" in his president's address of 1949, implying that if he were to encounter Picasso in the street, he would take great pleasure in kicking him up the a---. Before all that, however, Munnings was at the vanguard of British "impressionism," so it seemed a fitting end to the shoot to involve the impressive exterior of this pantheon of British artists. While at the Royal Academy, I snuck inside to see David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture, a stunning exhibition of Hockney's recent works, chiefly of the countryside around his home town of Bridlington in Yorkshire. Edward Thomas, the great poet of rural England, believed that a poem could be about anything - all that it depended on was "the intensity of the concentration." Hockney's central pieces compose a vast matrix of canvases; intense studies of woodland and hedgerows; distinctly British landscapes but with a vibrant, Californian palette. It's a celebration of seasonal change, of the urgency of spring, of the vivid colours that we easily forget line our highways and byways. Some say the pop artist has turned parochial, and yet the value that he mines from bright and focused concentration on natural forms is immense. Just when you think his hallucinatory, luminous visual sense must need adjusting, he demonstrates with a multi-camera video wall just how electric England's verdure can be. It shouldn't surprise you to learn that it's Mother's Day in Britain today. If it does, I'm sure the petrol station is still open. I can't really remember a time when I didn't know what a surprise was, but as we walked down to choose a card it occurred to me that my two year-old hasn't quite grasped the concept yet. "We're buying a card for Mummy," I say, "Which one shall we get?" But it's a surprise. So we mustn't say anything, OK? Stepping through the front door with all the enthusiasm of Christmas, she hollers: "Mummy mummy! We bought you a card! It's a surprise!