This blog may be a practise run, or an ongoing assemblage of observations, for a minor paper I hope to submit comparing the display of mosaics at two museums: the Zeugma Mosaic Museum, in Gaziantep, Turkey, and the Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia. I came across the Gaziantep museum by chance in 2013, in the […]
For the mosaic class assignment at the London School of Mosaic this week we’ve been asked to produce our own responses to the Unswept Floor. For the uninitiated, such as me, the Unswept Floor is arguably the most famous mosaic of the ancient world. Why? First, it was described by Pliny, who uniquely also […]
Where do you begin with mosaics? Impossible. But perhaps at the Zeugma Mosaic Museum in Gazientep, Turkey. The stunning, purpose-built museum displays the mosaics dramatically rescued from a huge Roman site being flooded by the rising waters of a dam. The museum took the so-called Gipsy Girl as it’s figurehead. The […]
Browsing the stands at the Winter Art & Antiques Fair at Olympia in November I came across this magnificent Italian marble table at Burton Antiques. The fine variety of the cut marble with geometric black inlay lines is combined with a mesmerising set of micro mosaics. The centre piece shows St Peter’s Square, […]
The Hawick painter Andrew Cranston, 50, was for twenty years a lecturer at Gray’s art college in Aberdeen, until 2017. Three or four years ago dealer Richard Ingleby visited his Glasgow studio and was stunned by what he found. A book on him has got glowing words from Peter Doig, the Scots […]
Leafing through the Edinburgh Fringe programme as one does I got interested by the numbers of performers running two or even more shows in the festival – comedians, in particular. One develops a nerdy appetite for possible phenomena like these – are there more of these double-uppers? Is it something forced on performers by rising […]
IF ART sales need confident buyers it was not the most auspicious week for the London Art Fair. Theresa May’s Brexit speech was reverberating during the VIP opening while Friday brings the strange new world of President Donald Trump. Soaring rents and rates in central London have seen two important venues for Scottish art close their doors in the past year, amid […]
There is no longer an art college in Scotland that teaches a dedicated ceramics degree. Which makes the ceramics on show at this year’s Visual Art Scotland winter exhibition more emphatically interesting. Susan O’Byrne graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in design and applied art in 1999. Her wall of fantastical animal heads in the […]
So there’s a simple joy, and the hope of a certain Scottish parsimony, in buying Christmas gifts direct from the maker. Nowhere better to start this weekend than at Coburg House studios in Leith, whose denizens have a refreshingly engaged attitude to the whole enterprise and where artists’ egos, and sensibilities, are disarmingly lacking. “I work in wood […]
In the front row of an intimate Fringe venue on Saturday night audience a young woman kept turning around to look at me, and others behind her, with her eyes open wide, her expression clearly asking – what is going on here? How am I meant to react? What am I watching? In show I witnessed in my […]
Scotland’s oldest private art gallery says it may seek a festival listing next year – in the Fringe programme. The Scottish Gallery is one of three major galleries on Dundas Street, centre of Edinburgh’s art trade, that are out of the Edinburgh Art Festival this year. The Fine Art Society is another grand dame of the Scottish trade, […]
Call it ‘beyond the art festival’, or the Edinburgh Art Festival Fringe. Within Edinburgh, there are several private galleries with significant exhibitions, particularly for the collector in various budget ranges, that are not in the line-up of this year’s festival. Outwith the city, there are also several promising shows, perhaps for mid-August, when you need a […]
Union Gallery – Reunion When Alison Auldjo began converting a former charity shop into the second incarnation of the Union Gallery, removing a lowered ceiling and turning a pokey back storage room into a well-lit stairwell, she knew exactly the picture she wanted in the space. It was Phil Braham’s Ophelia Bathing, a painting she had […]
Technically speaking, Surreal Encounters is what I’d call a stunner. In particular the middle room on the ground floor of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, where they are showing Salvador Dali’s vast Landscape with a Girl Skipping Rope. I’m no expert on the Surrealists but in terms of Scottish gallery exhibitions this is […]
The last day, of the Last Supper in Pompeii, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. A mosaic-related foray, but much, much, more. This small but exquisitely formed show closed on the 12th January, so little to add beyond a few haphazard thoughts. Paul Roberts, the curator of the show and head of the antiquities department, […]
Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia
Philadelphia is a place of edifices, of great architecture domestic and imperial in scale, from “Second Empire” to neo-classical of the grandest style. It’s also a place of quotations; the place is littered with sayings by Benjamin Franklin, inventor, revolutionary, founder of the University of Pennsylvania, coiner of meaningful admonitions. Franklin was also one […]
It is the premise of conceptual art, presumably, that artists conceive of a project they can then get others to do. Looking across the Great Hall of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery at John Flaxman’s white marbled statue of Scotland’s bard, glorifying Robert Burns as something heroic and pure, one feels Douglas Gordon’s vision of […]
Fly 2016 – Visual Art Scotland
There is no longer an art college in Scotland that teaches a dedicated ceramics degree. Which makes the ceramics on show at this year’s Visual Art Scotland winter exhibition more emphatically interesting. Susan O’Byrne graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in design and applied art in 1999. Her wall of fantastical animal heads in the […]
Collect: craft heaven at Somerset House
Collect begs the question: where does craft begin, and art end? Or craft end, and art begin? And what are either of them anyway? The show has moved from the Saatchi Gallery to Somerset House after ten years. Somerset House is a far more engaging and established venue, though navigating the various floors and wings […]
Friend of Peter: Andrew Cranston
The Hawick painter Andrew Cranston, 50, was for twenty years a lecturer at Gray’s art college in Aberdeen, until 2017. Three or four years ago dealer Richard Ingleby visited his Glasgow studio and was stunned by what he found. A book on him has got glowing words from Peter Doig, the Scots […]
IF ART sales need confident buyers it was not the most auspicious week for the London Art Fair. Theresa May’s Brexit speech was reverberating during the VIP opening while Friday brings the strange new world of President Donald Trump. Soaring rents and rates in central London have seen two important venues for Scottish art close their doors in the past year, amid […]
Fly 2016 – Visual Art Scotland
There is no longer an art college in Scotland that teaches a dedicated ceramics degree. Which makes the ceramics on show at this year’s Visual Art Scotland winter exhibition more emphatically interesting. Susan O’Byrne graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in design and applied art in 1999. Her wall of fantastical animal heads in the […]