The new Cordis Prize for tapestry, the only award of its kind in the UK, came home in its second year. From about 100 entries, and a short list that included artists from Japan, Denmark, Belgium and Brazil, the Scottish weaver and Edinburgh College of Art teacher Susan Mowatt won the £5,000 prize for her work, Black/time/lines/white/time/lines. The […]
In the late summer of 2015 the mayor of Montbéliard, a small but historic city nestled against the Swiss border in north-eastern France, had this idea. Montbéliard prides itself on a Christmas market and Christmas scene that draws hundreds of thousands of people from across the region, including Switzerland and Germany. Scotland was the invited guest this year […]
Our parents conspire to make us believe in Father Christmas; reindeer footprints by the fire place, stockings mysteriously filled. But the loss of that belief, the joining of the conspiracy. is itself a Christmas ritual, a symbol of moving out of childhood innocence into knowing adulthood. Le Gui et le Houx, Noel dans l’imagerie popular, a small […]
The Turner Prize show is notoriously easy to lampoon – it’s a case of fish and barrels – but it’s a strange year at Tramway, in Glasgow. Not easy outrage over elephant dung or unmade beds in but a curious emptiness. The first impression of the exhibition is of vast white spaces with ‘the work’ tucked away […]
You can read John McLellan’s latest column on the row in The Scotsman website here. The Scotsman’s report on new designs unveiled by the hotel backers on September 2 are here. The developer’s website with some 2,500 pages including all the documents seeking planning permission is here. The BBC’s report on the trust’s offer (see below) to buy and run […]
Developers intending to covert Edinburgh’s foremost neo-classical building into a luxury hotel “completely ignored” the advice of the watchdog body charged with overseeing the city’s status as a UNESCO World Heritage site, it is claimed. The director of Edinburgh World Heritage, Adam Wilkinson, told a public meeting held to help corral objections to the scheme that […]
Leonardo da Vinci was not born at his official birthplace in the village of Anchiano, the leading da Vinci scholar Martin Kemp said yesterday. Professor Kemp, one of the top authorities on the artist, is working on a book on Da Vinci with the archive researcher Giuseppe Palanti. He told an audience at the Edinburgh International […]
A Sign Manual of God Duncan Thomson, former keeper of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, on disegno and Bellany. From the start of his student days in 1960 John Bellany was overwhelmingly aware of the role that drawing would play in the great range of figurative painting he would soon launch himself into. His fellow student Sandy […]
In the bear pit of 2,500 shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, this multi-award winning play from Istanbul may be making festival history, but it’s just another production struggling for a bit of attention. On the other hand, it has a bear of an actor at the heart of it. NOTE: This was my review of the Empire Builders in […]
Shorn of its aura, the King of Tahiti’s personal family god, Temeharo, lies in its glass case in the basement of a London gallery. This once-powerful idol may have been venerated with human sacrifices. Now it seems an unprepossessing thing, a mostly featureless bundle of brown string, closely bound around a piece of wood, about a metre long. […]
Collectors and collecting: the subtle joys of cheese labeling. This selection of vintage postcards below, on offer at just one of the many desks, stacks and shelves at the Royal National Hotel in Bloomsbury gives a flavour of the monthly anoraks’ paradise that is the Bloomsbury Ephemera Fair. For anyone with an instinct for ‘collectibles’ […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Coburg House Christmas Open Studios
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 […]