Scottish Art News Issue 23 by Scottish Art News

SCOTTISH A RT N EWS

A R T

FIND OUT WHAT ART APPRECIATION REALLY MEANS INVITE SOTHEBY’S TO VALUE IT

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SIR JAMES GUTHRIE In the Orchard. Sold for £601,250. Auction record for artist. For enquiries or to book a complimentary appointment with a Sotheby’s Specialist please contact +44 207 293 6132 jane.oakley@sothebys.com 34–35 New Bond Street, London W1A 2AA. Register now at sothebys.com

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Image credits clockwise from top left: Kwang Young Chun, Aggregations, Dovecot Gallery Edinburgh Art Festival 2015; Shannon Tofts; Mike Wilkinson; Dovecot Studios; and Dovecot Café by Stag Espresso

DEALERS IN SCOTTISH PAINTING 1650 to the present

Dovecot Studios was established by the 4th Marquess of Bute in 1912 and incorporated into the Edinburgh Tapestry Company in 1946. Today, Dovecot Tapestry Studio continues a century-long heritage of making and collaboration with leading contemporary artists. The Studio works to commission from private and public collectors around the globe – to produce extraordinary and engaging works of art. The Studio has been based in a number of locations in Edinburgh, including a site near a 16th century dovecot. It now has a permanent home in the refurbished Infirmary Street Baths, where it forms the heart of Dovecot Gallery – a landmark centre for contemporary art, craft and design.

None of this would be possible without the support of the Dovecot Foundation, which exists to champion and support Dovecot Tapestry Studio and its place in the world of contemporary art, design and making and is committed to bringing them to a wider audience.

Dovecot Tapestry Studio 10 Infirmary Street Edinburgh EH1 1LT www.dovecotstudios.com info@dovecotstudios.com 0131 550 3660 Tapestry Studio Viewing Balcony: Mon-Sat 12-3pm. Free entry. Check website as times may vary.

Private and public sale of artworks Valuations and auction advice Conservation and research Framing, installation and shipping Growth and management of collections

Grey Headland Oil on canvas 28 x 28 in

6 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ www.fasedinburgh.com | art@fasedinburgh.com FAS Edinburgh Ltd

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Cyril Gerber Fine Art, established forty years ago, in an intimate space, this gallery is a place for art enthusiasts, collectors and first time buyers to browse through an exciting collection of works. The atmosphere is informal and relaxed and you can just enjoy looking and chatting, without apologising for not buying. Here you can see works by prominent 19th to 21st century British Artists, Glasgow Girls & Boys, the Scottish Colourists, 20th Century Scottish Masters, St Ives School, Modern British, and regular exhibitions of current Contemporary Scottish Artists.

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Threatening, 2.i.2013, oil on board, 32 x 36 cms (detail)

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Arthur Melville 1855–1904 The Mosque of Córdoba Watercolour, 6¾ × 9½ in. (17.1 × 24.1 cm) Signed and dated July 1890, inscribed Cordoba Provenance: Private Collection, Scotland

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NEWS 6

REGULARS Briony Anderson Rachael Cloughton Neil Cooper David Pollock

Art Market Tim Cornwell

Private View The Royal Holloway Laura MacCulloch

FEATURES 16

New Scottish Artists: The Brownlee Brotherhood Susanna Beaumont

PREVIEWS New Scottish Artists: New Contemporaries Griselda Murray Brown Northern Lights: Works from Aberdeen Art Gallery Alison Fraser

Ripples on the Pond Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow

Artist Rooms: Joseph Beuys Timespan, Helmsdale

William Gear Towner, Eastbourne and City Art Centre, Edinburgh The Improbable City Edinburgh Art Festival 2015

Graham Fagen: Scotland + Venice 2015 Neil Cooper

Design in Motion: V&A Dundee Rachael Cloughton

Duncan Shanks: The Poetry of Place Anne Dulau Beveridge

Good Books Selected by Good Press Matthew Walkerdine

Anthony Schrag: Lure of the Lost Claudia Zeiske

Eduardo Paolozzi: Studio of Objects Chris Horrocks

Cover Image Graham Fagen, Scheme for Lament, 2015. Indian ink and enamel on paper

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Recent Acquisitions Rachael Cloughton

Scottish Artists 1750–1900s From Caledonia to the Continent Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyrood House, Edinburgh

Arthur Melville National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

Luc Tuymans: The Tyranny of Images Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

ISSUE 23 / SPRING/SUMMER 2015 EDITOR’S NOTE This issue marks an exciting new chapter for Scottish Art News. After six years of editing and producing the magazine, published biannually by the FlemingWyfold Foundation, I am delighted to be handing over the role to Rachael Cloughton. Rachael is based in Edinburgh and is Visual Art Editor for The List. She will continue the foundation’s commitment to promote Scottish art and creativity to wider UK and international audiences. In 2003, my former colleague, Polly Bielecka, produced the first issue of Scottish Art News, an eight-page newsletter, which two years later developed into a full-colour magazine. Since then, the title has continued to grow in scale and profile, and I would like to take this opportunity to express my deepest gratitude for all the support the magazine has received. In particular, I thank Katie Baker, Sarah Batten, Neil Cooper, Kirsten Downie, Bill Hare, James Knox and Paul Macgee, whose contributions have helped make the magazine what it is today. The magazine would not have been possible without the backing of its advertisers, especially Lyon & Turnbull who sponsored the publication from its inception. Of course, Scottish Art News ultimately relies on its subscribers and readers, and I extend a huge thank you to you all for your continuing support. It has enabled the magazine to remain a not-for-profit publication dedicated to bringing visual art and culture in Scotland to a wider readership, highlighting both the foundation’s own collection and exhibition programme, as well as including interviews with contemporary artists and editorial by leading art historians, curators and authors. 2015 looks set to deliver a richly diverse programme of exhibitions, projects and festivals across Scotland and beyond. Graham Fagen will represent Scotland at the 56th Venice Biennale (9 May–22 November). Ahead of his solo presentation, commissioned and curated by Hospitalfield Arts in Arbroath, Graham talks to Neil Cooper about how the work has developed. We also hear from the Brownlee Brothers, recipients of the 2014 Fleming-Wyfold Bursary, who share their thoughts in an insightful discussion with their mentor, curator Susanna Beamount. As always, this issue brings regular previews, books, art market reports and news, keeping you up-to-date with visual art and culture in Scotland. Briony Anderson The Fleming Collection is widely recognised as the finest collection of Scottish art in private hands and is the only dedicated exhibition space granting public access to Scottish art year-round. It was originally conceived in 1968 as a corporate collection for the London premises of Scottish merchant bank Robert Fleming Holdings Ltd. Since 2000 the collection has belonged to the FlemingWyfold Foundation which aims to promote Scottish art and creativity to national and international audiences. The collection includes works by many of Scotland’s masters, from 1770 to the present day, including works by Raeburn, Ramsay, Wilkie the Glasgow Boys, the Scottish Colourists and many contemporary Scottish names. In addition, there is a regularly changing exhibition programme of loaned works as well as exhibitions drawing on the permanent collection.

SCOTTISH ART NEWS The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street London W1J 8DU United Kingdom T: (0)207 042 5730 E: scottishartnews@flemingcollection.com Scottish Art News is published biannually by the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation, London. Publication dates: May and November.

SUBSCRIPTIONS One-year subscription UK £9 | Europe £14 | International £20 Two-year subscription UK £18 | Europe £28 International £40 T: (0)20 7042 5730 E: gallery@flemingcollection.com

ADVERTISING Briony Anderson T: (0)20 7042 5730 E: briony.anderson@flemingcollection.com Rachael Cloughton E: rachael.cloughton@flemingcollection.com Behind Scottish Art News at the Fleming Collection Editor Rachael Cloughton Editorial assistance Briony Anderson, Catherine Hooper, Nancy Cooper, Emilie Atkinson, Paul McLean Design Lizzie Cameron www.lizziecameron.co.uk Printed by Empress Litho Limited © Scottish Art News 2015. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Scottish Art News accepts no responsibility for loss or damage of unsolicited material submitted for publication. Scottish Art News is published by the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation but is not the voice of the Fleming Collection or the Foundation. All images copyright of the artist or artist’s estate unless otherwise stated.

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S C O T T I S H

New Director Appointed for the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation In February 2015, the board of the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation announced the appointment of James Knox as the foundation’s new Director. Scottish-born Knox has been closely engaged in both the Scottish and international art scenes. For the last ten years, he has been Managing Director of The Art Newspaper, as well as serving as a trustee on a number of boards, including the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Trust for Scotland and the Great Steward of Scotland’s Dumfries House Trust. Prior to working at The Art Newspaper, Knox ran his own arts consultancy and was Publisher at The Spectator. He is author of several books on subjects including writer, art critic and historian Robert Byron (1905–41) and cartoonist, author and art critic Osbert 6 | ART

Lancaster (1908–86). His most recent book is The Scottish Country House (Thames & Hudson, 2012). ‘It is a huge honour to become Director of the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation,’ says Knox, ‘which has long been the standard-bearer for Scottish art outside Scotland. I greatly look forward to pursuing its goals of cultural diplomacy and realising the foundation’s ambition to bring Scottish art to national and international audiences through a wide range of initiatives.’ Rory Fleming, Chairman of the Management Committee, said: ‘On behalf of the trustees, we are delighted that James has accepted this appointment. The foundation has great ambitions in coming years to play its role in building wider support for Scottish art and deepening understanding of our artistic heritage.’

Inspired by the Fleming Collection In 2014, to mark the centenary of World War I, the Fleming Collection commissioned award-winning Scottish poet John Glenday (b.1952) to write a poem in response to its painting The Eve of the Battle of the Somme (1916) by Sir Herbert James Gunn (1893–1964). It was published in Scottish Art News, issue 22. This year, Mosaic Films and the Poetry Society have produced a film that uses the imagery of Gunn’s painting as a platform for original animation and motion graphics, offering an animated visual interpretation of the poet’s words. Art of War: The Eve of the Battle of the Somme is the first film in a series that aims to combine World War I art with newly commissioned poetry. Each two-minute film provides an innovative lyrical and visual perspective on the war. poetrysociety.org.uk | mosaicfilms.com

A R T | N E W S both simple and mysterious, is thrilling. It is not about producing attractive drawings, rather it is to learn something and have an exciting experience along the way.’ Observational drawing is taught to some 1,000 students per week by a specialist faculty comprising over 75 practising artists, over the Royal Drawing School’s five London campuses. Scotland has a strong tradition of draughtsmanship passed down through the art schools from its oldest art institution, the Trustees Drawing Academy of Edinburgh, where many Scottish artists received their training. Founded in 1760, it is now incorporated into Edinburgh College of Art. As part of the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation’s active loaning programme, a number of works from its collection are on long-term loan to Dumfries House in Ayrshire. Fully funded residencies at Dumfries House are open to alumni and faculty of the Royal Drawing School and their partner UK and US art schools, including Glasgow School of Art and Yale University. Dumfries House provides

Drawn from the Fleming Collection: In association with the Royal Drawing School The Fleming Collection is delighted to be collaborating with the Royal Drawing School on an exhibition opening at the collection in July. The Fleming-Wyfold Foundation invited Royal Drawing School alumni to choose a work from the Fleming Collection to display alongside their own artwork, reflecting upon why they have selected a particular work. At a time when traditional drawing performs a less central role across art-school education, the Royal Drawing School believes in drawing as a primary language, a crucial route to innovation across multiple disciplines. Postgraduate courses at the school are divided into three main areas: drawing in the studio, drawing from art and drawing London. When drawing from art, students are encouraged to visit museums and galleries. Tutor and fine artist Paul Gopal-Chowdhury explains: ‘Drawing from paintings is the best way to understand them. Being able to follow the extraordinarily rich and complex structure of an image from an earlier time, which is

a private studio and self-catering accommodation on the estate for up to four artists at any one time. Works by alumni who have participated in this residency will be on display in the exhibition. The Royal Drawing School was founded in London in 2000 by HRH The Prince of Wales and artist Catherine Goodman as the Prince’s Drawing School, and was recently granted permission to bear the royal imprimatur in recognition of the school’s academic and artistic excellence. Drawn from the Fleming Collection: In association with the Royal Drawing School 9 July–26 August The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London, W1J 8DU T: (0)20 7042 5730 | flemingcollection.com Open: Tuesday–Saturday 10am–5pm (Closed Saturdays throughout August)

1 Sir James Gunn, The Eve of the Battle of the Somme, 1916. © Fleming-Wyfold Foundation 2 Meg Buick, Lascaux Deer, 2013 3 Jessie Makinson, Untitled (work produced from drawings at The National Gallery), 2012

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Works from the Fleming Collection to be shown at Jerwood Gallery in Hastings This spring sees the Fleming Collection brought to East Sussex for the first time in collaboration with the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings. The resulting exhibition, ‘A Scottish Selection: Paintings from the Fleming Collection’, draws on the key artists and areas of overlap between the two galleries, inviting a conversation between these important private collections. The show focuses on a group of works from the twentieth century by significant Modern British artists, including Craigie Aitchison (1926–2009), Anne Redpath (1895–1965), John Bellany (1942–2013), William George Gillies (1898– 1973) and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2014). An important artist in both collections is Craigie Aitchison, who won the first Jerwood Painting Prize in 1994. His Crucifixion (1993) and Wayney Going to Heaven (1989), from the Fleming Collection, are exhibited for the first time alongside the Jerwood Collection’s Crucifixion (1994) and St Francis (1993). Crucifixions were a major theme for Aitchison who, although not religious, found the subject moving and powerful. The Fleming Collection was acquired by Flemings, the former merchant bank, and is now widely regarded as the finest collection of Scottish art in private hands. It comprises over 750 oil paintings and watercolours from 1770 to the present day, and is the only dedicated gallery granting free public access to Scottish art all year round. Since the Jerwood Foundation’s purchase of From my Window at Ditchling (c.1925) by Sir Frank Brangwyn (1867–1956) in 1993, the Jerwood Collection has grown in stature and importance to include over 250 works, the core of which date from between World War I and the 1960s. The collection features significant works by such Scottish artists as Alan Davie (1920–2014) and Peter Howson (b.1958).

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Speaking about the exhibition, James Knox, Director of the FlemingWyfold Foundation, said: ‘I am delighted that the Jerwood/ Fleming celebration of this group of Scottish artists, so expressive of the range of Scottish painting in the twentieth century, should coincide with my arrival as Director of the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation, because the show fulfils the core aim of the Fleming Foundation: to promote Scottish art and creativity outside Scotland. These fine works from two such superb collections will open the eyes of many to the glories of Scottish art and will provoke questions about the universality of national schools as well as their distinctive characteristics.’ A Scottish Selection: Paintings from the Fleming Collection Until 12 July 2015 Jerwood Gallery Rock-a-Nore Road, Hastings Old Town, East Sussex, TN34 3DW T: (0)1424 728 377 | jerwoodgallery.org Open: Tuesday to Sunday 11am–5pm Friends of the Fleming Collection receive 2 for 1 on ticket admission – for details of how to join as a Member please see p.72

‘ These fine works from two such superb collections will open the eyes of many to the glories of Scottish art and will provoke questions about the universality of national schools as well as their distinctive characteristics’

2015 Fleming-Wyfold Bursary Award Winner Announced At the opening ceremony of this year’s ‘RSA New Contemporaries’ exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy on 13 March, Edward Humphrey was announced as the winner of the 2015 Fleming-Wyfold Bursary. Humphrey, a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, received a bursary of £10,000, plus £4,000 towards production costs for the next year. His winning video installation, Another Fiction, will be on display in ‘New Scottish Artists’ at the Fleming Collection (12 May–24 June 2015). It will appear alongside works by other graduates from Scotland’s art schools, among whom are 2014 Fleming-Wyfold Bursary winners The Brownlee Brothers (see p.16–18). The selection panel who decided on this year’s winner included Phil Long, Director of the V&A Museum of Design

‘ Humphrey, a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, received a bursary of £10,000, plus £4,000 towards production costs for the next year’ Dundee; Griselda Murray Brown, freelance arts journalist; Graham Fagen, artist and representative for Scotland + Venice 2015 at the 56th Venice Biennale; David Benson, Trustee of the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation and Selina Skipwith, Art Consultant and Former Director of the Fleming Collection. Long described how he was ‘struck by the beauty and intellectual curiosity of Humphrey’s work’, which was selected after a long and challenging discussion. A key aspect of the bursary is a year-long mentoring programme.

Curator Susanna Beaumont will work with Humphrey throughout the year supporting his professional development and transition to an established career. New Scottish Artists 12 May–24 June at the Fleming Collection, London. flemingcollection.com

4 Jerwood Gallery, Hastings. © Ioana Marinescu 5 Edward Humphrey, Another Fiction, 2014

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Glenfiddich Awards £10,000 Art Prize to Aberdeen Sculptor Ben Martin Grays School of Art graduate Ben Martin has won one of the top prizes at this year’s ‘RSA New Contemporaries’: the Glenfiddich Artist in Residence Award. William Grant & Sons, the owners of Glenfiddich Distillery, launched the prize in January this year. As part of the award, Martin will join seven other artists from around the world on Glenfiddich’s prestigious Artists in Residence (AiR) programme this summer, receiving a fully equipped house and studio, a monthly stipend and a significant production fee for making new work. The total cost of the prize amounts to £10,000. Martin’s work will also be exhibited during the summer at the distillery’s art gallery.

The Talbot Rice Gallery celebrates its 40th anniversary with the launch of ‘TRG3’ The University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery turns 40 this year. To celebrate, a new and exciting programme developed to support and promote young artists and experimental work has been launched. The project, entitled ‘TRG3’, has been initiated by Stuart Fallon, Assistant Curator of Artists’ Projects at the gallery. Five artists will be selected each year to exhibit in the Round Room of the gallery: a graduate from Edinburgh College of Art, another UK graduate, an international artist, an artist selected through an open call and one other. A programme of talks, events and screenings will support each artist’s work. ‘While the Round Room will be the core site of this activity, I want it to extend beyond there, both physically and digitally, seeing it as the epicentre of the programme, rather than its fixed home,’ explains Fallon. ‘The website will be a key part of this, with artists being added as soon as they are 10 | ART

confirmed, creating almost a collective of artists involved in the project rather than a chain of individuals.’ Artists will also have physical access to more than the Round Room space in the gallery. ‘I am very keen to fully utilise the breadth of opportunity that our position within the University of Edinburgh represents. There are things that only we can offer artists: access to the University of Edinburgh Collections and a direct route to a vast array of world-class academics across all fields,’ continues Fallon. ‘With this in mind I hope we are in a position to offer a unique experience to an artist at an early stage in their career, one that will prove to be of definitive benefit to the development of their practice.’ Steven Anderson, Fabienne Hess and Jess Johnson have so far been selected as artists-in-residence for 2015. Artists can apply through the Open Call in August. trg3.co.uk

A panel of judges, including painter Alison Watt and Dundee Contemporary Arts Curator Graham Domke, selected Martin from among 70 artists in the ‘New Contemporaries’ exhibition. His large-scale sculpture made from rope and steel weights secured him the prize. Martin explained: ‘My overwhelming focus is on personal experience. The simple development of loading weight on the end of a line of rope and creating tension allows me to draw in a three-dimensional space.’ glenfiddich.com/explore/ artists-in-residence

‘ There are things that only we can offer artists: access to the University of Edinburgh Collections and a direct route to a vast array of worldclass academics across all fields’

‘ Much more than simply “open doors”, the festival coordinates an ambitious and diverse programme of artist-led initiatives – often collaborative – outside a gallery setting’ 6 Ben Martin, Line and Weight, 2014. Rope and steel, RSA Gallery 3 Installation 7 Steven Anderson, The Sea and Growing, 2015. Performance with Alistair Quietsch 8 Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, CRICOTEKA, 2014. Courtesy of the Artist 8

Glasgow Open House Art Festival 2015 Over four days at the start of May, Glasgow Open House Art Festival (GOH15) saw over 200 artists and 58 venues participate in exhibitions and events across the city. Almost twothirds of the programme took place in and around artists’ homes, with the rest held in a variety of spaces, ranging from a launderette in the East End to the Botanic Gardens. Much more than simply ‘open doors’, the festival coordinates an ambitious and diverse programme of artist-led initiatives – often collaborative – outside a gallery setting. Established by Glasgow School of Art (GSA) alumna Amalie Silvani-Jones in 2013 and run on a voluntary basis by GSA graduates, the festival builds upon the strong DIY culture prevalent in the arts in Glasgow. Without the restraints

of a gallery space, art filled the city itself. On Glasgow’s South Side, CHAR NAH! HOR saw artists Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (b.1973) and Jedrzej Cichosz (b.1985), along with their young son Dragan, each take a room in their house to transform through printing, painting and collaging directly on to its walls. In Garnethill, Hannah Brackston (b.1988 ) and Daniele Sambo (b.1983) re-imagined a front garden in a tenement building by creating a transient greenhouse and micro-botanic glasshouse. On the banks of the River Kelvin, seven artists created interventions across the Botanic Gardens, and A Thoroughly Modern Man saw Keith Moore curate a selection of rarely seen works by post-war designer and teacher at GSA Robert Stewart (b.1924), drawn from the family archive.

A variety of events and artist-led walks across the city gave audiences a unique insight into current ideas, practices and processes within the context in which the artists are living and working. A consideration of context as being integral to the artwork itself has been a key aspect of contemporary art in Glasgow over recent decades. Based on the evidence of this year’s programme, this will continue to find force and the festival will grow in scale and profile. glasgowopenhouse.co.uk

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Glasgow Set to Host the Turner Prize in 2015 Continuing its biannual tradition of decamping from Tate Britain in London and journeying to a cutting-edge contemporary venue somewhere around the country, the Turner Prize exhibition makes its first appearance in Scotland at Glasgow’s Tramway this autumn, showing the four shortlisted artists’ work ahead of the ceremony in December. A late-19thcentury engine shed for the city’s tram network, the building was re-imagined as a state-of-the-art exhibiting venue for the European City of Culture celebrations in 1990, which rather neatly dates it in line with the impressive renaissance in Glasgow’s now internationally respected modern art scene. While the designation of City of Culture was one catalyst for the city’s emergence in the 1990s, it was Glaswegian video artist Douglas Gordon’s victory in the 1996 Turner that truly began Scotland’s – and particularly Glasgow’s – long and fruitful association with the prize. Of the 60 finalists since the millennium, almost a quarter have been Scottish or have a 12 | ART

strong Scottish art-school connection, a satisfyingly disproportionate number, which includes last year’s winner, Irishborn, Glasgow-based Duncan Campbell (b.1972), alongside the likes of Richard Wright (b.1960) and Simon Starling (b.1967). ‘Tramway won the bid to host the Turner Prize based on a number of interrelated elements,’ says Sarah Munro, Director of the venue. ‘First and foremost, we have a great programme – high quality, agenda setting, experimental and dynamic – in one of the most sought-after and prestigious spaces in Scotland. We are respected by artists, and have a very strong reputation for working closely with them and being artist-led in our approach. An essential part of the story is also Glasgow itself, the artistic community, the phenomenal role of Glasgow School of Art and the thriving crossover with music, dance and visual art.’ Kitty Anderson, Curator at the city’s Common Guild and of Campbell’s show last year, is sure Glasgow’s artistic output played a part in the decision to stage the Turner Prize here, although

she says, ‘I’m just worried it’s going to jinx it’ [the city’s chances of another winner]. Some of her favourite gallerygoing experiences have been at Tramway, from David Mach’s Here to Stay (1990) to Martin Boyce’s Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours (2002) and Campbell’s Make It New John (2009). ‘It is very significant that this is happening,’ concludes Munro. ‘It is part of a story; it is not an end point and it did not come from nowhere. It builds on the reputation the city already has, on Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, the centrality of the Glasgow School of Art and all the brilliant production facilities like Glasgow Sculpture Studios. The scene is very dynamic and always evolving, as is Scotland.’ The Turner Prize 2015, 1 October 2015–17 January 2016 at Tramway, Glasgow

9 Tramway Interior, courtesy of Glasgow Life 10 Members of the Scotland + Venice team. Photographs by Alan Dimmick 11 Members of the Scotland + Venice team. Photographs by Alan Dimmick

Highlands and Islands Art Students Selected for Scotland + Venice Learning Programme Three students from the University of the Highlands and Islands have been selected to take part in the 2015 Scotland + Venice Learning Programme. This will be the first time students from the Moray School of Art have participated in the programme since it began in 2003. Julija Astasonika, Hester Grant and Amanda Lightbody, who are all studying for a BA (Hons) in Fine Art, will each spend a month at the Venice event between May and September. Dr Gina Wall, Curriculum Leader at Moray School of Art, said: ‘It has been a pleasure to work with Hospitalfield Arts, curators of Fagen’s exhibition, to select students for

Scotland + Venice Launches its Largest Ever Learning Programme for Scottish Students Twenty-eight students and recent graduates from seven art and design schools across Scotland have been selected to participate in Scotland + Venice’s prestigious Learning Programme this year. Students will be based at the Palazzo Fontana, where Graham Fagen’s solo exhibition for Scotland + Venice is located (see p.26). They will greet visitors and communicate the impact of the programme through a new initiative called ‘The Loop’, intended as a collaborative project through which students can share their experience of Venice with their peers in Scotland. Hospitalfield Arts, which curated Fagen’s exhibition, also helped to select the students to participate on the Learning Programme, developing the project alongside teaching staff at each of the seven schools. Hospitalfield’s Director, Lucy Byatt, explained: ‘The opportunity

this ambitious Learning Programme. It is a privilege to be invited to participate and I hope our relationship grows ever stronger as we engage in future projects. The Scotland + Venice Learning Programme is a wonderful opportunity for our students to acquire professional skills that are highly relevant to their chosen field. Students are at the heart of what we do and we want to support them to achieve as much as they can.’ The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust is providing support for two of the university’s students to take part in the programme. Founded by the artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004), the trust helps young people and other individuals to fulfil their potential in the visual arts by offering grants, bursaries

to shoulder considerable responsibility as the public face of Scotland + Venice and to spend a month living and working in Venice is an experience we all wish we had had when we were at college. I very much look forward to working with the students that we have selected from each college.’ When the Learning Programme launched in 2003, one of the first participants was Kitty Anderson, now Curator at the Common Guild and a member of the curatorial team for Venice + Scotland in 2013. She said: ‘The six weeks I spent living and working in Venice provided a wonderful introduction to what is involved in presenting an exhibition on an international platform. The people, places and ideas I came into contact with at that time have been hugely influential throughout my career, not least 10 years later when I was part of the curatorial team for Scotland + Venice 2013.’

and scholarships through selected colleges and universities. Geoffrey Bertram, Chair of the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust, said: ‘This is a great opportunity for the students to learn what it takes to exhibit at such a major international event and how to make it a success. Such opportunities are rare.’ uhi.ac.uk scotlandandvenice.com barns-grahamtrust.org.uk Scottish Art News | NEWS | 13

Creative Laboratories at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop Earlier this year, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (ESW) opened its Creative Laboratories, a building designed for sculptors and dedicated to the production and presentation of contemporary visual art. The Creative Laboratories building was designed by Sutherland Hussey Architects, who worked with ESW on the development of their first building, the Bill Scott Sculpture Centre in 2012. The brief for this second space was to create a venue that would bring audiences closer to the artists working at ESW. The result is an open-air environment, with a central courtyard surrounded by a series of bays designated for outdoor working. Public viewing areas are located around the site to enable visitors to see artists at work, and a large project and exhibition space sits at the end of the courtyard. Perhaps the most dramatic feature of the design is a 22.5m

A White Wood for Huntly There is at once a sense of timeliness and timelessness to the new Joseph Beuysinspired permanent land art installation from Huntly-based arts organisation Deveron Arts. The project uses 100 acorns from 7000 Oaks, the mass planting by Joseph Beuys (1921–86) in the bombed-out German town of Kassel between 1982 and his death in 1986. The work was produced as part of Documenta, the modern and contemporary art event that takes place in Kassel every five years. The new planting in Huntly in the north of Scotland is intended to extend the tribute to those killed during World War II to include World War I, reflecting Beuys’s aim of implying permanence far beyond human actions. 14 | ART

‘These acorns will mature into monuments for peace,’ says Claudia Zeiske, Founding Director of Deveron Arts, noting that Beuys himself was in the Luftwaffe. ‘The idea is one of longevity, ecology and sustainability, because oaks can live up to 1,000 years and the aim is that the city eventually becomes a forest.’ Created by visual artist Caroline Wendling, White Wood will comprise 700 trees (the number seven was significant to Beuys’s life and practice), including 49 oaks alongside silver birch, hawthorn and many complementary white plants. ‘We hope it will be of interest to Beuys’s many worldwide followers,’ says Zeiske, ‘and to those who wish to find a place of peace. We discovered during our research that there were five conscientious

triangular tower, which acts as a visual and cultural beacon, attracting visitors to the complex, while punctuating Edinburgh’s skyline. The tower currently houses a newly commissioned sound installation by Tommy Perman, Professor Simon Kirby and Rob St. John, which will be exhibited until the summer. The work, titled Concrete Antenna, sonically explores the past, present and (potential) future of the workshop’s site via sound gathered from audio archives and specially made field recordings. The installation subtly responds to the movements of visitors, the prevailing weather conditions and the state of the tide in Granton. In doing so, the tower becomes a concrete antenna, picking up impressions of the imagined sonic memory of the site and creating a unique experience for every listener. edinburghsculpture.org

objectors in Huntly during World War II, and they were shunned because of this.’ Locating the piece in Scotland is particularly relevant, she says, because the original 7000 Oaks used basalt from the Isle of Staffa, sourced by Beuys, a regular visitor to Scotland. The new work will bring together trees from Germany, stone from France and the soil and elements of Scotland. White Wood, from 30 March at Deveron Arts, Huntly, Aberdeenshire

Katy Dove 1 December 1970–27 January 2015 It is with sadness that Scottish Art News reports the death of Glasgow-based artist and musician Katy Dove, aged 44. Dove’s vibrant animations were invested with a sense of colour and rhythm, something she also applied to the music of Muscles of Joy, her all-female band. Born in Oxford, Dove grew up one of five sisters in Jemimaville on the Black Isle. After studying psychology at the University of Glasgow, she made jewellery before gaining a scholarship to Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee in 1996. Here, Dove began to explore sculpture, and introduced animation to her automatic drawings, resulting in Fantasy Freedom (1999), a 90-second film that formed the core of her degree show. Dove went on to become one of the artists in ‘Zenomap’, Scotland’s first Venice Biennale show in 2003. Animations such as Meaning in Action (2013) focus on the exploration

of bodily movement, but Dove’s last exhibition in 2014 at Duff House in Banff, Aberdeenshire, investigated the interplay between the architecture of a space and the display of the artwork. It formed part of GENERATION, the nationwide year-long showcase of Scottish contemporary art over the last 25 years. She is survived by her mother Maggie, sisters Anna, Sarah, Lucy and Emma, and her partner Tom Worthington.

12 Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Creative Laboratories. Photograph by Kenny Hunter 13 Stones collected from WWI battlefields by pupils from the Gordon Schools. Planted with each of the oak saplings. 2015. © Ross Fraser McLean, StudioRoRo 14 Katy Dove, Stop It, 2006. (Animation still) 15 Katy Dove on the beach © Anna McLauchlan

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NEW SCOTTISH ARTISTS The Brownlee Brotherhood Susanna Beaumont

Susanna Beaumont chats to Fraser and Calum Brownlee one year on from winning the Fleming-Wyfold Bursary. Fraser (b.1989) and Calum (b.1991) Brownlee make work collaboratively as the ‘Brownlee Brothers’. They graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), Dundee, in 2013 and were awarded the Fleming-Wyfold Bursary at the ‘RSA New Contemporaries’ the following year. The bursary included a £10,000 prize and a further £4,000 towards production costs. A selection of this new work will appear at the Fleming Collection as part of the gallery’s ‘New Scottish Artists’ exhibition running from 12 May–24 June 2015. SB = Susanna Beaumont, FB = Fraser Brownlee, CB = Calum Brownlee SB: We’re sitting on a fine sunny afternoon in March in your studio in Dundee. It’s now been a year since you were awarded the first Fleming-Wyfold Bursary. Has it been a good year? FB: Yes, yes for all of the above! SB: Can you tell me what the bursary award has meant to you, Fraser? FB: It’s taken the stress away from graduating from art school and being thrown into the real world – the monetary stress, anyway. SB: It hasn’t taken away all the stress though has it? FB: No, not really! But it has allowed us time to play about with ideas in the studio and not think, ‘oh, that costs X amount of money’. It’s given us that freedom. We have made mistakes in the studio but that’s vital to exploration. We have been able to buy time to explore ideas and experiment with new materials. SB: It sounds as though you have pushed your work and taken risks. 16 | ART

FB: Yes, I think that’s what it’s meant to me anyway. It’s meant being able to have freedom in the studio, and we have used part of the bursary to rent a studio in Dundee, which has been brilliant. SB: Was getting a studio a priority for you once you had been awarded the bursary? FB: Yes, we put down a deposit almost immediately and moved all of our work from Duncan of Jordanstone, where we studied, into the studio. CB: Or, as our mother calls it, ‘nonsense rubbish’. Yet, this is the material – car parts, fabric, glue, wax, old postcards, books and old works – that gives us ideas and a context for new work. FB: The studio is an old jute mill and is very near to Verdant Works, another old jute mill that is now a museum. It’s got old iron fittings and high ceilings and archways – it sounds very elaborate, but it’s not, but it’s a great space for us. SB: Let me tell you it’s quite cold. You’re both sitting here in T-shirts, but I am wearing a polo neck and a coat, hat and my scarf! And, we should say that the studio may be in the heart of the old jute land of Dundee, but it’s also 5–10 minutes from Dundee Contemporary Arts, 10 minutes from Duncan of Jordanstone and 15 minutes from the train station and the new V&A Museum of Design, due to open in 2018. It’s great that you can work slap bang in the heart of the city. CB: Yes, it’s good and we’re very proud to be from Dundee. We work well here and get lots done. SB: When you graduated from DJCAD here in Dundee in 2013, how did the bursary enable you to make the transition from students to active artists?

FB: It meant that we were able to make that transition immediately. We come from a very proud background – a line of Dundee publicans, and it was expected that we would be publicans. CB: But, our gran worked in the jute mills and our grandad worked for publishers DC Thomson. Dundee is in our blood. When we graduated, a lot of our friends moved to Glasgow and to bigger art scenes but we’re very proud of Dundee and very connected to the city and its art scene. So we made a conscious decision to stay. Our work is inspired by our lives here, so it wouldn’t really make sense to leave. FB: We’ve been particularly inspired by The Howff burial ground in the centre of Dundee, which dates back to 1564. It lies very close to the secondary school we went to and we found ourselves drawn to it. CB: There are lots of ancient graves with skull-andcrossbone headstones. We researched the graveyard’s history and learned that there are probably mass plague pits. There’s also a gravestone for Sir William Wallace’s wife, supposedly. Other symbols on some of the gravestones signify a person’s trade, so you can wander round and read these stories. There are nine incorporated trades of Dundee, including baker, cordiner, glover and bonnet maker, each with their own trade symbol. We became interested in how symbols tell a story, especially throughout history, and this connects and inspires our work.

SB: I feel that your heart and soul belongs to Dundee, and it’s also the language of the place – whether it’s the language and history of the symbols found on gravestones or contemporary tattoos – that inspires you. There’s a ‘Dundonian-ness’ in your work. It’s about explaining these sometimes hidden signs and symbols and meanings, isn’t it? CB: Yes, and it’s storytelling as well – we’ve both been brought up in pubs and both worked in pubs, so it’s also about how things can get totally blown out of proportion! SB: Robert Fleming, founder of Flemings bank, was from Dundee, so for the first bursary it’s fitting that you were both born in Dundee, studied in Dundee, took a studio in Dundee and that a lot of your work references Dundee. CB: It was interesting to find out that Robert Fleming was born and raised in Lochee in Dundee, an area west of Dundee that was home to Camperdown Works, one of the biggest jute mills in Dundee. Now it’s really nothing, everything has closed down. Our father actually had a pub in Lochee called ‘The Planet Bar’ on South Road. It’s quite an odd-looking building, architecturally. That’s maybe why some people call it just ‘The Planet’. FB: A lot of people from Lochee are very proud. Dundee might be a very small city, but you get people from Stobswell [another area of Dundee] who are proud of Stobby, and Lochee boys are very proud to be from Lochee. We were chuffed to hear that Robert Fleming was a Lochee boy and it ties in nicely with our work and the pride that we have in our heritage.

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SB: Tell me a little more about the time you have spent at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Lumsden, Aberdeenshire. I understand you are making a new body of work there. CB: Yes, we’ve been there before and it is one of our key resources. FB: It’s in the middle of nowhere and it’s a good place to escape to for a few weeks, to focus on making work and to be around other artists. The amount of things that we have learned is pretty unbelievable – how to weld and experiment with different materials, and we’ve worked with some great technicians. I think that a good point to make is that the bursary has allowed us to play again. The way we make our work is very playful and we like learning new skills, we like the tactile nature of sculpture and learning new things that start feeding into new works. SB: For the forthcoming exhibition at the Fleming Collection you are making new sculptures, looking at heraldry, looking at warfare, looking at weaponry. There is an extraordinarily rich mix of ideas coming together at the moment. FB: We like bringing together the historical and we’re really interested in the sanctity of certain objects and the tackiness and grotesqueness of others. We like combining our past and our heritage with the regal and the historical – a sort of warping and making it current. We look at an object and think it had a past and a story, and a life. The new body of work that we’re making focuses on this. CB: The ideas are quite similar to the themes in our degree show, but I think they are much more mature and better thought out. We’ve had time to think about these ideas and we’ve had time to play about with new materials. SB: Let’s go back to how you work together. There are other sibling artists that work together, such as Dinos and Jake Chapman or Louise and Jane Wilson. How is it for you? And, how did this working relationship evolve? FB: Our degree show was the first time we showed work together. CB: I don’t think there’s any sort of recipe for working together, it just naturally came about. We lived together and we worked in the pub together during art school, so we’ve always been into the same sort of thing. We disliked, well, we hated each other when we first went to art school, but over time we learned to bring ideas together. It’s not easy, but it’s still good to have somebody to bounce ideas off, and I think we get things done a lot quicker when we’re together. FB: Yeah, as in any relationship we have our ups and our downs. CB: It’s true, many people think that because we work collaboratively it’s all a great success, but no – we’ve got to work at it. FB: It’s like a marriage!

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CB: People often ask us: ‘What would you make if you worked on your own?’ But, as Fraser says, the themes and the things we’re into and what we’ve been raised with are so intense, so integral, that it doesn’t matter if you take one of us out of it. The most important thing to our practice as brothers, and also as collaborators, is that there is a lot we don’t need to discuss because we already know, we’ve already been through it. FB: The brotherhood!! CB: Yeah, the brotherhood, to put it bluntly. Susanna Beaumont works as a curator, an artist mentor and an advisor on contemporary art acquisitions and the development of philanthropic giving. She was Founding Director of doggerfisher art gallery in Edinburgh (2000–10) The Brownlee Brothers will be presenting Standing Alone in This World, an installation of new work at ‘New Scottish Artists,’ a Royal Scottish Academy exhibition supported by the FlemingWyfold Foundation. New Scottish Artists 12 May–24 June 2015 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London, W1J 8DU T: (0)20 7042 5730 | flemingcollection.com Open: Tuesday to Saturday 10am–5.30pm

NEW SCOTTISH ARTISTS RSA: New Contemporaries 2015 Griselda Murray Brown

A show with more questions than answers from Generation Y. The art-school degree show is a tricky thing, as anyone who has ever visited one will know. Both sprawling and tightly packed, it is not unusual for students’ work to be displayed in corridors and even on staircases. Some of it is dazzling – fizzing with ideas and executed with originality – while some is inaccessible, poorly made or just plain bad. Having been a crowded free-for-all for many years, in 2009 the Royal Scottish Academy decided to make ‘New Contemporaries’, as the annual showcase is known, more selective, and in doing so created a barometer for new art in the country. The busy, salon-style hang gave way to a more spacious design, allowing each work proper consideration – and visitors a more rewarding experience. This year, 52 art and 19 architecture graduates were chosen on the strength of their degree shows last summer. Drawn from Scotland’s five art schools, the numbers are proportionate to the size of each institution, with roughly one in seven taking part. It is the seventh year of the exhibition and what is striking is the professionalism of both the work and its installation. Ascending the stairs to the show, you are confronted by Erin Fairley’s Orange Rope (2014) suspended above: a copper hoop held in place by horizontal ropes that beam out like rays of light. It is as motionless as a line drawing, its ropes tight around the grand neoclassical columns, but as you climb the stairs and your sight line shifts, the hoop briefly aligns with the domed skylight at the top, a momentary eclipse. Photographs show the piece installed in rugged Highland settings: fanned out across a frozen loch; clinging spider-like to a scree-covered bank. Environmental installations often loose their power when brought indoors, but Orange Rope has a minimalist quality that suits the space.

Connections emerge between the works. While Fairley suggests a simple, natural beginning in a sunrise, Emma Smith’s upside-down curtains at the top of the stairs – the crimson velvet kind found in old-fashioned theatres – imply a more cultivated welcome. They are parted to reveal nothing but a plain white niche. Their defiance of gravity is mysterious, gold tassels reaching pointlessly into the air. It is a deadpan joke, just out of reach. The ‘show’ we are about to see will contain more questions than answers. In the best work, there is a confidence in the relation of concept to physical form. Edward Humphrey’s two-screen video installation Another Fiction contrasts the outdoors on one screen (tall trees, a desolate football pitch, the hair on a horse’s back) with indoor scenes on the other (laboratory samples, bones in a museum, a book of botanical illustrations). These are overlaid with an audio track sampling Seamus Heaney, Grayson Perry and two neuroscientists debating the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. Indoors and outdoors stand for knowledge and sensation, head and heart, respectively, and they battle it out across the screens and in our ears. Yet, the formal symmetry of the double screen – a brittle bone here, a rotting tree there – suggests that, ultimately, it is all connected. It is so beautifully shot and edited that Humphrey could use less audio, trusting in th0e power of the images. But this is a captivating piece that rewards close attention, and he is a worthy winner of the £14,000 FlemingWyfold Bursary (see p.9).

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As in last year’s show, printmaking is strong. Moira Watson’s crisp screen prints have particular visual flare. Exploring ideas of invisibility, they draw formal comparisons between maps and microscopic-level structures, their elusive contours like tiny veins. But, their delicacy belies a strong political intention: the maps show Afghanistan and Iran, pointing to the things – war, exploitation, injustice – we chose not to see. With most born in the early 1990s, the artists in ‘New Contemporaries’ are, as graduate Richard Phillips-Kerr puts it, ‘natively digital, not immigrants’. Phillips-Kerr’s Avatar. Hardened, hollowed, dehydrated. RIP The Sims Online (2014) is a plaster cast of the naked artist on to which a video recording of the live man, breathing and blinking, is projected. It is a singularly disturbing piece. New technology is grafted on to old, but the result has none of the timeless grace of classical statuary: this man is of our world, yet alien, and our relationship with him is distinctly problematic. While the best artists here engage with contemporary issues, they do not slavishly follow art-world trends. One of the most exciting things about the exhibition is the sense of delight in material and process that comes off the work. Charlotte Nash’s wonderfully bulbous sculptures made of tights recall Sarah Lucas, only to take her ideas further. Pink expanding foam has been pumped into each ‘leg’ and squeezed out through the fibre of the material, emerging as organic growths or even organs. This is what ‘New Contemporaries’ is all about: the unbridled energy and experimentation of artists at the beginning of their careers.

Griselda Murray Brown is a freelance arts journalist who grew up in Edinburgh and now lives in London ‘RSA New Contemporaries 2015’ showed at the Royal Scottish Academy earlier this year. ‘New Scottish Artists’ at the Fleming Collection, presents a selection of works from ‘New Contemporaries’, bringing works by nineteen artists from the Edinburgh exhibition to the Fleming Collection in London. New Scottish Artists: a Royal Scottish Academy exhibition supported by the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation 12 May–24 June 2015 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London, W1J 8DU T: (0)20 7042 5730 | flemingcollection.com Open: Tuesday to Saturday 10am–5.30pm

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC; While the best artists here engage with contemporary issues, they do not slavishly follow art-world trends. One of the most exciting things about the exhibition is the sense of delight in material and process that comes off the workâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 21

1 Brownlee Brothers, courtesy of the artists 2 Brownlee Brothers in their studio in Dundee, courtesy of the artists 3 Brownlee Brothers at the Scottish Sculpture Studios in Lumsden, courtesy of the artists 4 Tim Dalzell, At 32,000,000 Metres, 2014, Installation view: RSA. Photo Chris Park 5 Charlotte Nash, Mind of its Own, 2014. Photo Chris Park 6 Nathan Anthony, Connect 4, 2014. © The Artist 7 Erin Fairley, Orange Rope, 2014 8 Samantha Wilson, Monica, 2015. © The Artist 9 Samantha Wilson, Mass in Isolation, 2015. © The Artist 10 Moira Watson, Blood for NO Oil, 2013. © The Artist

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NORTHERN LIGHTS Alison Fraser

Works from the Aberdeen Art Gallery travel south for new exhibition at the Fleming Collection. In March 2015, Aberdeen Art Gallery closed for a major redevelopment, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The renovation project, ‘Inspiring Art and Music’, will transform the art gallery and the adjoining Cowdray Hall and War Memorial and aims to provide a world-class cultural centre, celebrating art and music in the north-east of Scotland. The Heritage Lottery Fund has awarded £10 million towards the cost of the work, while Aberdeen City Council has pledged a further £10 million. The remainder of the total cost of £30 million is to be acquired through fundraising, currently underway. The alterations to the gallery, masterminded by Gareth Hoskins Architects, will provide a new top floor housing a suite of state-of-the-art galleries, which will host temporary exhibitions. Consequently, there will be more space in the existing building for the permanent collections, making it possible to display more of the Fine and Decorative Art collections. In addition, there will be two new educational suites and an area dedicated to new media and artists in residence. Current facilities will be upgraded to 21st century standards, with a new café and shop, improved services for visitors and staff and a passenger lift. It is anticipated that the refurbished space will reopen towards the end of 2017. During the closure period, selected works from the collections will be shown at various venues. The Fleming Collection in London will host the exhibition ‘Northern Lights’, which concentrates on works with a Scottish connection. Most of the featured artists are Scottish, but also included are paintings of Scottish scenes, such as Caerlaverock Castle, painted by JMW Turner (1775–1851) from sketches made during his fifth visit to Scotland in 1831, when he was invited to provide illustrations for Sir Walter Scott’s Poetical Works. The exhibition will highlight the breadth of the collection of Scottish art, from Aberdeen-born

portraitist George Jamesone (1590–1644) to emerging Edinburghborn artist Rachel Maclean (b.1987), who combines film and performance art to address Scottish identity and who will show an audio-visual piece. Several examples from the outstanding collection of portraiture will be shown, including Miss Janet Shairp (1750) by Allan Ramsay (1713–84), who is considered to be the premier Scottish portrait painter of the mid-18th century. Notable artists from Aberdeen, such as William Dyce (1806–64) and John ‘Spanish’ Phillip (1817–67) will be represented: Dyce by his splendid Pre-Raphaelite vision Titian Preparing to make his First Essay in Colouring (1856) and Phillip’s Una Maja Bonita (1856), a painting that demonstrates how visiting Spain liberated his art. Joseph Farquharson (1846–1935), whose family have occupied Finzean Estate, Aberdeenshire, since the 16th century, is known for his haunting snow scenes including Afterglow (1912), which will form part of ‘Northern Lights’. Farquharson was friend and mentor to John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), whose striking portrait Mrs John William Crombie (c.1898), will also feature in the show. In 1993, the collections were enriched by a bequest from John Hyslop of his fine paintings by the Scottish Colourists. An early still life by Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935) titled Still Life, Painter’s Materials (1900-05), has been selected for display, along with Moonlight, Loch Lomond, (c.1924) by George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931). The development of the collections has also benefited from a bequest by one of the gallery’s early supporters, granite merchant Alexander MacDonald. The terms of his bequest stated that it was to be used to purchase works not more than 25 years old, ensuring that the gallery made contemporary art a priority.

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1 Joseph Mallord William Turner RA, Caerlaverock Castle, c.1832 © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections 2 Rachel Maclean, The Lion and the Unicorn, 2012, video [still] © The Artist and Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections 3 Allan Ramsay, Miss Janet Shairp, 1750 © The Artist and Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections 4 William Dyce RA HRSA, Titian Preparing to make his First Essay in Colouring, 1856 - 1857 © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

Two paintings in ‘Northern Lights’ were bought using income from this bequest: Joan Eardley’s Harvest Time, a landscape painted in the village of Catterline, Aberdeenshire, and In the Canteen (1954) by Josef Herman (1911–2000), who knew Eardley in Glasgow. More recent acquisitions by such Scottish artists as Calum Innes (b.1962), Alison Watt (b.1965) and Henry Coombes (b.1977) demonstrate how the collection has remained vibrant and contemporary. It is hoped that visitors to the Fleming Collection will not only enjoy the exhibition, but will also be inspired to visit Aberdeen to view the redeveloped art gallery when it reopens. Alison Fraser is Lead Curator of Art at Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Aberdeen Art Gallery at the Fleming Collection: Northern Lights 4 September 2015–27 January 2016 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London, W1J 8DU T: (0)20 7042 5730 | flemingcollection.com Open: Tuesday to Saturday 10am–5.30pm 24 | ART

Other locations will also show artworks from Aberdeen’s collections. Drum Castle, a National Trust for Scotland property in Aberdeenshire, will host ‘Human Presence’, placing mid-tolate-twentieth-century figurative painting and contemporary installations in a new context. The Towner in Eastbourne will display ‘North to South’, with works from the Towner’s permanent collection complementing pictures from Aberdeen, including Eric Ravilious’s Train Landscape (1939), which epitomises the idea of a journey. Aberdeen Art Gallery will visit Cookham, where all the Stanley Spencer works will be shown for the entire closure period. In addition to these larger exhibitions, the busy loans programme will continue, with pieces going to Drents Museum, The Netherlands (Glasgow Boys); ARoS, Denmark (Impressionists) and Tate Britain, London (Barbara Hepworth). At the Maritime Museum in Aberdeen, items from the Fine and Decorative Art collections will serve as focal points for a diverse range of exhibitions running throughout the period when the gallery is closed

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GRAHAM FAGEN: SCOTLAND + VENICE 2015 Neil Cooper

Scottish Art News visits the studio of Graham Fagen, the artist representing Scotland at the Venice Biennale this year. Graham Fagen (b.1966) appears to be making gold when Scottish Art News comes calling at the Glasgow-based artist’s home studio. Alchemy of one kind or another is certainly on Fagen’s agenda as he fires up lumps of clay in the kiln in his garden shed. These rough-hewn cubes will form part of a series of works that will make up Fagen’s solo show, which, under the auspices of Hospitalfield Arts in Arbroath, will represent Scotland at this year’s Venice Biennale. Upstairs, the floor is lined with small bronze trees, on the branches of which will eventually hang some of the cubes currently being fired. For Venice, Fagen is planning to mount a large-scale bronze tree, which, as he explains, he is ‘trying to take the life out of, so it’s some kind of cross between nature, architecture and function’. Fagen showed in Venice in 2003 as part of Scotland’s first year at the Biennale in the group show ‘Zenomap’, as well as in the non-country-based group shows in 2001 and 2005. This year sees Scotland’s Venice programme move into new premises, with Fagen’s work being seen across four rooms in the Palazzo Fontana, a 16th-century palace knee-deep in faded grandeur overlooking the city’s Grand Canal. In the entrance area above the door, audiences will be greeted by an Italian version of Come into the Garden and Forget about the War, a neon installation created during a project for the Talbot House Museum in Poperinge, Belgium, a former World War I clubhouse run by Australian clergyman Philip ‘Tubby’ 26 | ART

Clayton, who put tongue-in-cheek signs listing the house rules around the building. The signs were re-created when the house became a museum, and, as the Imperial War Museum’s former Official War Artist in Kosovo, Fagen recognised the potential power of such signs if seen in countries with very different but nonetheless deep-set experiences of war. Fagen explains: ‘It set up an idea that opened up a lot of possibilities depending on the context in which it was seen, in terms of language and place. Depending on where you see it, war is going to be pertinent to the collective psychology of that country at that time. It was interesting when I first made it in German, because we were having conversations about Iraq, but then inevitably, being in Berlin you’re going to talk about the Wall and things like that.’ Then in France, I did it in Marseilles, and that brought up a lot of discussion about the islands around Marseilles that were captured by the Germans. So, it not only opened up a lot of conversations, but it also set up a lot of conceptual ideas about a garden, and whether it is a place where you can get away from war.’ One of the rooms in Venice looks set to be dominated by drawings of heads, based on a sensory approach, whereby Fagen felt each of his teeth with his tongue and drew the results. He then marked each drawing with Indian ink according to his perceptions of the spaces in his mouth. Fagen elaborates:

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‘The first stage was quite pragmatic, then the stage with the Indian ink was really freeing. I did lots of these drawings, and after a while, I thought I’d better have a look and see what I’d been doing. I realised that what I’d been trying to do in some way was to draw consciousness and to try and represent the self. There was a difference between ones I’d done on a Monday morning, which were really dark, and ones I’d done on a Saturday, where the colours were really bright.’ Much of Fagen’s work for Venice echoes previous pieces, with earlier incarnations of the bronze trees and teeth drawings seen in the exhibition ‘Cabbages in an Orchard’, Fagen’s contribution to the year-long GENERATION showcase of contemporary art in Scotland, which was seen at Glasgow School of Art in 2014. The centrepiece of Fagen’s Venice show will be an audiovisual installation that continues his fusion of the work of poet Robert Burns with dub reggae, in what he describes as ‘a remake of a remake’ of his version of Burns’ The Slave’s Lament (1792), performed by reggae singer Ghetto Priest with dub producer Adrian Sherwood at the controls. Added to the mix for the Biennale are musicians from the Scottish Ensemble and composer Sally Beamish. Such a multifaceted collaboration was inspired by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt after Fagen heard his setting of Burns’ My Heart’s in the Highlands (1789). ‘It’s a ridiculously fantastic version,’ states Fagen. ‘Before I heard it, I thought there’s a classic cliché of how Burns gets dressed up by a particular culture with a song like that, but Pärt’s version is so haunting, and the sonic spaces he sets up allow the lyrics to get into our heads, investing them with a completely different meaning to how I first read them.’ Like Burns, Fagen is Ayrshire-born, although, weaned on a musical diet of punk and reggae, it was only later that he started to connect with words and music from a heritage altogether closer to home. The links Fagen eventually made were compounded by the discovery that, blighted by poverty, Burns almost travelled to Jamaica to take a job overseeing slaves as a plantation bookkeeper.

Fagen’s melding of Burns and dub reggae dates back to 2005, when he first collaborated with Sherwood and Priest on the audio-visual installation Clean Hands Pure Heart, which married Auld Lang Syne (1788) and The Slave’s Lament with a reggae beat at Tramway arts space in Glasgow. This was followed in 2009 with a live rendering of four Burns songs by Priest, Sherwood, Tackhead guitarist and long-term Sherwood collaborator Skip McDonald, percussionist Pete Lockett and English folk guitarist Ian King. The songs – A Man’s A Man For A’ That (1795), A Red Red Rose (1794), The Tree of Liberty and I Murder Hate (1790) – were recorded for a CD that was given away during the live gig at Fagen’s exhibition ‘somebodyelse’ at the Stirling-based Changing Room Gallery. Another CD, featuring Bob Marley’s War and I Murder Hate, was given away as part of a show by Fagen at The Empire Café in Glasgow in 2014 to commemorate the centenary of World War I. In this respect, Fagen’s roots are easy to spot in this new work, which forms part of a continuum that Fagen is happy to acknowledge. He is grateful to begin a show with experience rather than from a completely blank slate. ‘The hardest part is to find out what you want to do,’ he says. ‘Once you’ve worked that out you can start to work towards it.’ Fagen grins and with a nod to pioneering dub reggae icon Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, he explains, ‘It’s like Lee says: “Everything starts from Scratch”.’ Neil Cooper is a writer and critic on theatre, music and art based in Edinburgh Graham Fagen is exhibiting at the Venice Biennale from 9 May–22 November Palazzo Fontana Cannaregio 3829-3830, Venice scotlandandvenice.com Open: Tuesday to Sunday 10am–6pm

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1 Graham Fagen, Consciousness (B&W), 2014, Indian ink and enamel, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Graham Fagen 2 Graham Fagen, Guerra/Giardino, 2015, Photo: Graham Fagen 3 Production image, (L-R: Diane Clark, and Graham Fagen), Graham Fagen, The Slaveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Lament, 2015. Photo: Holger Mohaupt 4 Production image, (L-R: Graham Fagen, Sally Beamish, Ghetto Priest, and Jonathan Morton), Graham Fagen, The Slaveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Lament, 2015. Photo: Holger Mohaupt 5 Graham Fagen, Scheme for Lament, 2015. Indian ink and enamel on paper

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DESIGN IN MOTION Rachael Cloughton

Sarah Saunders, Head of Learning and Engagement at V&A Museum of Design Dundee, explains how digital technology is inspiring designers – and now audiences – across Scotland. ‘Design in Motion’ is the first national touring exhibition organised by V&A Dundee. Shown inside the Travelling Gallery – a custom-built, mobile gallery located inside a bus – are works by seven Scottish designers working in different disciplines, ranging from textiles and jewellery to engineering and software design. Saunders explains: ‘We started developing the concept for ‘Design in Motion’ in 2013, when we proposed the idea to the Travelling Gallery. They are a wonderful organisation that has been touring contemporary art around Scotland since the 1970s, making it accessible to everyone. We were looking for a way to promote Scottish design around the country, and at the same time to create what we believe to be the first map of Scottish design. The Travelling Gallery was the perfect fit. ‘When we looked at the designers and the design industries in Scotland, a strong digital theme immediately became apparent. Not all designers selected have a background in digital, but the way they have embraced new technologies has enabled them to innovate and create things that would not previously have been possible.’ The possibilities for digital technology to inspire designers working in very different disciplines are reflected in the seven participants in the show. Holly Fulton, Sara Robertson and Sarah Taylor, Lynne MacLachlan, Sophia George, Geoffrey Mann and studios Anarkik3D and the Digital Design Studio (DDS) all use very different media, and this is the point that ‘Design in Motion’ is trying to make. ‘It was not just designers in the digital

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sector who were using these technologies as tools to innovate – practitioners in all areas of design were,’ explains Saunders. ‘We wanted to reflect that in our selection, to capture the zeitgeist of design practice, the mood and excitement of the changing nature of design and designers.’ Fashion designer Holly Fulton demonstrates the creative potential of digital technology by digitalising handdrawn designs to enable production via laser cutting and digital print. Collaborative artists Sara Robertson and Sarah Taylor combine smart materials with traditional processes to create textile surfaces digitally programmed to emit light and change colour, transforming the potential of textiles. Lynne MacLachlan’s futuristic accessories dazzle with flickering, optical effects, only achievable through using Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and a 3D printer. Elsewhere in the exhibition digital technologies are used to re-frame older, existing works or to bring back to life lost sites. Sophia George presents the iPad game Strawberry Thief, inspired by the William Morris Strawberry Thief pattern (1883), in the V&A collection. Visitors can play the game as well as view sketches, prototypes, artwork and a short film about the making of it. DDS – a post-graduate research centre at Glasgow School of Art specialising in real-time 3D capture, 3D sound, modelling, motion capture and animation – present digital models of Scotland’s five UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The technology allows for a virtual visualisation of sites, which in some cases, no longer exist.

‘ We started developing the concept for “Design in Motion” in 2013, when we proposed the idea to the Travelling Gallery. They are a wonderful organisation that has been touring contemporary art around Scotland since the 1970s, making it accessible to everyone’ Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 31

The other design studio in the show, Anarkik3D, exhibits the Cloud9 software it developed to make it easier and more affordable for makers to embrace 3D modelling tools. Used with the ‘Novint Falcon’ 3D Touch Controller, (a type of joystick often used in gaming) users can physically feel the objects they are designing on screen. The seventh participant, Geoffrey Mann, Programme Director in Glass at Edinburgh College of Art, captures the ephemeral nature of time and motion through photographic and digital technologies, including 3D printing. For the exhibition, the fluttering of a moth becomes a delicately hanging sculptural form that audiences can see. The process of organising the show also took on its own innovative appropriation of digital platforms, with the organisers using Pinterest to facilitate the development process. ‘We invited a broad range of people to help develop the concept including Curator of the Travelling Gallery Alison Chisholm, Scottish designers and academics from the four art schools. [Using] Pinterest to curate the exhibition came out of those early workshops. It seemed like a very natural approach,’ says Saunders. Each person involved in organising ‘Design in Motion’ contributed to a secret V&A Dundee Pinterest board, and Saunders admits that many other ideas started to develop in the process: ‘It proved particularly successful – not only did we

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come up with the concept for ‘Design in Motion’, but also with a whole range of other ideas for future exhibitions.’ There are over 500 Pinterest ‘pins’ in total, which will unveil themselves in the museum’s future projects. This collaborative approach is also what inspired the Design Scotland app. ‘The opportunity presented by the tour got us thinking,’ continues Saunders, ‘We want to learn from our audiences as well as about them – how could we start that dialogue about Scottish design in a playful and innovative way? And so the idea for the ‘Design Scotland’ app was born.’ Created in collaboration with Dundee-based tech developer eeGeo, the app is free to download from the App Store and Google Play. It works by allowing users to create a design map of Scotland through sharing their design stories, icons and photos. ‘They can pin whatever excites them most about design in Scotland,’ elaborates Saunders, ‘whether that is architecture, digital, games, engineering, fashion, furniture, graphics, jewellery, performance, product, textiles or transport.’ The Travelling Gallery left Dundee in February to visit locations all over Scotland. When ‘Design in Motion’ reaches its final destination at the V&A in London towards the end of June, it will have stopped at 80 venues across the country. Saunders says:

‘So far we have seen toddlers and school pupils, teenagers, families and older people, all of whom are responding positively to the exhibition and its design – we have some wonderful comments in the visitor book. Many of the objects look familiar at first. But, once you understand the process behind them and their unique potential, it leads to a new dimension of understanding, togethe r with the realisation that they have all been developed right on our doorstep.’ To find out when ‘Design in Motion’ is stopping at a destination near you go to vandadundee.org/design-in-motion

Rachael Cloughton is Editor of Scottish Art News

1 Sara Robertson and Sarah Taylor, Digital Lace 2014 2 Holly Fulton, A/W 2014 Look 21 3 Lynne MacLachlan, Quituple Necklace 2014 4 Digital Design Studio, Mackintosh Facade 5 Geoffrey Mann, Nocturne 2014 6 Lynne MacLachlan, Phase Round Earrings 2014

All images © The Designer

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THE POETRY OF PLACE Anne Dulau Beveridge

Exploring the sketchbooks of landscape and still-life painter Duncan Shanks

Nature is at the heart of everything I do. I prefer nature to the art gallery. I like to be outside and active. Drawing in my sketchbook, I am part of nature and my studio is an extension of the landscape Duncan Shanks, 2014 A landscape and still life painter, Duncan Shanks was born in 1937 in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, and studied at Glasgow School of Art in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before marrying fellow artist Una Gordon and settling in the Clyde Valley where he has lived ever since. Fascinated by nature in all its forms, the artist has spent the last five decades examining it closely, and rethinking landscape painting in the process. His first significant solo show, ‘Falling Water: Variations on a Theme’, at the Talbot Rice Gallery in 1988, brought him recognition from Scottish academic and art circles, and he is now represented in many public collections across the UK. As hinted at by the opening quote, an essential aspect of Shanks’s working method is his use of sketchbooks. The artist often states that drawing has always been an addiction and a 34 | ART

compulsion. He started filling sketchbooks in the 1960s, making quickly drawn notes for himself. By the 1980s, they had become a vital tool in which to work out different approaches and to develop a new pictorial vocabulary. The majority are used out of doors and focus on landscape. A determination to see nature close-up is another key element of Shanks’s work. Perpetually driven, he ventures outside through the day and sometimes into the night regardless of the conditions, lying on the ground, standing in burns and streams, or under falling snow – in short, immersing himself fully, whatever the discomfort. This physical engagement with nature allows him to become part of it, to experience it directly, and to feed back into his work the feelings born of these encounters.

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In 2008, the artist started to consider what to do with the sketchbooks piling up in his studio. He was encouraged by friends to discuss the matter with The Hunterian, which led to a series of visits to the artist’s studio between 2008 and 2013, and resulted in the gift of his entire sketchbook collection – 106 and counting – to the museum in 2013. Three different types of sketchbook can be identified. The first, which the artist refers to as a ‘thinking book’, tends to be small, worked in pencil and includes numerous notes; it is about taking raw material to the next level or finding solutions for paintings in progress. The second type, mainly representational, is larger in size and worked in mixed media, recording what catches the artist’s attention. The third is used to explore particular subjects in depth. Of course, very few sketchbooks are entirely of a single type. They all go backwards and forwards in time, jump from one location to another, are often used over the course of several years and are worked on simultaneously (Shanks rarely has less than two sketchbooks on the go at any time). Collectively, they provide unique insight into the evolution and preoccupations of one of Scotland’s greatest living landscape artists. Until 16 August, the Hunterian’s exhibition ‘Duncan Shanks Sketchbooks’ presents a unique opportunity to see more than 40 sketchbooks, alongside works generously gifted by the artist to complement the sketchbook collection. In its accompanying publication, The Poetry of Place: The Upper Clyde through Duncan Shanks’s Sketchbooks, the artist highlights how ‘it is a strange paradox that although I have made a living by painting, it has always been a private activity, and my sketchbooks a private visual diary.’ Heightening the paradox, the process of

going through the sketchbooks with the artist resulted in precious additional insight into Shanks’s work and world. Talking about his formation as a painter, he recalls: ‘Learning my craft at art school was totally absorbing, but the techniques I acquired for still life and the figure did not prepare me for the constantly changing landscape beyond the studio walls. ‘The art that I saw in the London art galleries at the time was an urban art, hard-edged and controlled, synthetic in colour and precise in form and design. It was a world away from the earthy northern landscape that was in my blood, and had nothing of the impermanence and transitory qualities that I experienced daily. ‘Only after seeing exhibitions of the work of Arshile Gorky (1904–48) and Willem de Kooning (1904–97), did I sense a link in contemporary painting with my immediate surroundings and my painterly approach. Although the pundits of Abstract Expressionism decreed that nature had been exhausted as a subject for serious painting and was obsolete and passé, the individual practice of many of the artists seemed to belie the theory and their work seemed closer to my vision than that of the realists of the time. ‘I embraced the dynamic whirlpool of paint. It opened up the perpetuum mobile of the storm and the falling water. My work became a perverse fusion of contrasting disciplines. I now work in a creative tension, between figuration and abstraction, and find the marriage of opposites can be productive. My paintings often start as abstract improvisations and in the process of painterly exploration and development, my sketchbooks are like an image bank. If I see something that interests me, it becomes part of my content.

‘ My drawings have never been an end in themselves. They are of prime importance to my working method and are the thresholds to my imagination’

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‘My drawings have never been an end in themselves. They are of prime importance to my working method and are the thresholds to my imagination. The puzzles that I attempt to solve in the studio originate in the sketchbook drawings. The act of mark-making on paper not only concentrates the vision, but being in time makes visible nature’s dynamism. Energy and movement are for me vital and unavoidable in celebrating the Scottish landscape.’

1 Corra Linn top fall in full spate, 1984-5, pastel (GLAHA 56432/55) 2,3,5 Tinto, passing shower, 1990s, pastel and compressed charcoal 4 Birds cross the valley, late 1980s, mixed media 6 Looking up a gulley and scree, Tinto, late 1990s, pastel and compressed charcoal 7 Duncan Shanks on the shore at Culzean © Una Shanks

Anne Dulau Beveridge has been Curator of pre-1945 French and British Art at The Hunterian since 1997. Anne is the author of ‘The Poetry of Place The Upper Clyde Through Duncan Shanks’s Sketchbooks’ published in March 2015 by Freight Books

All are copyright of the University of Glasgow Photographic Unit

Duncan Shanks Sketchbooks: The Poetry of Place Until 16 August The Hunterian University of Glasgow, 82 Hillhead Street, Glasgow, G12 8QQ T: (0)141 330 4221 | gla.ac.uk/hunterian Open: Tuesday to Saturday 10am–5pm and Sunday 11am–4pm The sketchbook collection can be viewed by appointment in The Hunterian print room. 7

Duncan Shanks Works on Paper 3-30 June 2015 www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/duncanshanks

16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ TEL 0131 558 1200 EMAIL mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk www.scottish-gallery.co.uk Resting, 1965, pastel on paper, 33 x 42.5 cms (detail)

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 37 TSG Duncan Shanks Scottish Art News advert 3.indd 1

30/03/2015 19:40

GOOD BOOKS SELECTED BY GOOD PRESS Matthew Walkerdine

Good Press is a bookshop and gallery based in Glasgow that specialises in the promotion, production and sale of independent publishing projects and visual art. Co-founder Matthew Walkerdine selects some of the best publications made by Scottish artists and art writers that he has seen over the last year.

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1. The Burning Sand, various artists (The Burning Sand), £4 Edited by Glasgow-based writer and Curator Sarah Lowndes, The Burning Sand is one of my favourite journals, with a new issue upcoming this summer. Established to promote and represent the vibrant grassroots art scene in Glasgow, the publication features a host of established and emerging Scottish and international art practitioners. The Burning Sand has a great feel; it is a clean and organised magazine while still retaining an experimental energy. Its design, by Sophie Dyer and Maeve Redmond, is subtle, allowing the ideas and forms of the artworks to speak for themselves and live freely. 2. Visible is Visible, Rebecca Wilcox (Hour Editions), £6 This beautiful new publication by Glasgow-based artist Rebecca Wilcox is published by Hour Editions in Copenhagen, and was cocommissioned by the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. The book is a reconfiguring of recent texts by Wilcox, which when visually translated are among the most exciting and original I have seen come through Good Press. 3. Museums Six, various artists (Museums Press), £20 Museums Six features artists and writers from Scotland and further afield on the subject of ‘Art for Leisure’. Taking the form of a compilation-style package, the sprawling and lengthy publication stands as much as a sculpture or an artist’s edition, with incredible packaging by Manchester-based artist Lucy Jones. Artworks take varying forms: essays, short stories, ideas, collage, and more. Museums Press has yet again provided a wonderful home for varied and exciting new work. 4. Waning, Sarah Schneider (Blotter Books), £5 At the start of 2015, new Glasgow-based publisher Blotter Books released Waning, its first artist’s edition. It is this kind of artist’s publication of which I am most fond: a quick glimpse into the practice of an artist of whom I was previously unaware. A subtle, soft and graceful collection of pencil works over 12 dusty-pink pages, the publication is hand bound and comes with a screenprinted poster insert, showing much promise for the newly formed imprint.

5. You Are of Vital Importance, Sarah Tripp (Book Works), £12 The highly regarded London-based publisher Book Works has released a collection of writing by Glasgow-based artist, writer and lecturer Sarah Tripp, offering her work to a much wider audience in a familiar novel-esque format. You Are of Vital Importance is a collection of very short stories and written glimpses concerning social interactions, the construction of character and people. There is real warmth to the book, both in content and book form – it is a work you can pick up and read time and time again. 6. Anna et Salomé, Adrià Cañameras (Lawson’s Books), £22 Edinburgh’s Lawson’s Books released one of my favourite photobooks of 2014, the colourful and romantic Anna et Salomé. At times abstract, at times a study, the book is concerned with the Mediterranean where Adrià Cañameras grew up. The colours are incredible and the imagery transports readers directly on to the artist’s journey. The design and production is careful and clever with a bold cover painting by Michael Docherty, showing that Lawson’s Books takes its time on projects, getting them right and doing the highest justice to the work between the pages. 7. Various publications, Owen Piper (self-published), various prices An artist we admire greatly, the prolific Owen Piper, is unstoppable in his production of artist’s publications and editions. With an astounding eight new booklets made towards the end of 2014, Piper sums up my feelings on contemporary low-run art-zine making: have an idea, publish it and provide a snapshot of an artist’s practice at that very moment. Piper’s works are varied, from micro-poems in Soup Soup to his Maris Piper Press potato-print publications and collage works, all of which are immediate and simply produced. Owen Piper will no doubt continue to produce some of my top publications of 2015. Good Press 5 St. Margaret’s Place, Glasgow, G1 5JY T: (0)141 258 7659 | goodpressgallery.co.uk Open: Tuesday to Saturday 11am–6pm

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1 The Burning Sand, various artists (The Burning Sand), £4

5 You Are of Vital Importance, Sarah Tripp (Book Works), £12

2 Visible is Visible, Rebecca Wilcox (Hour Editions), £6

6 Anna et Salomé, Adrià Cañameras (Lawson’s Books),

3 Museums Six, various artists (Museums Press), £20

7 Various publications, Owen Piper (self-published), various prices

4 Waning, Sarah Schneider (Blotter Books), £5

£22

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LURE OF THE LOST Claudia Zeiske

A pilgrimage to the Biennale. Lure of the Lost is a contemporary pilgrimage that sees artist Anthony Schrag (b.1975) walk from Huntly in Aberdeenshire to Venice in Italy. Starting in June, the pilgrimage will take three months and cover 2,500 kilometres. It has been organised in conjunction with The Walking Institute, which explores the human pace through journey-based projects. Founded in 2013 by Deveron Arts, the institute acknowledges the ephemeral structures involved in walking and the opportunities for the creation of dialogue and the sharing of knowledge that the activity presents. It is interested in the role of artist-led initiatives to contribute to wider concerns of environment and place. Pilgrimages, both traditional and modern, are routes taken to seek reflection and spiritual, material or remedial reward. Lure of the Lost sets its sights on the Venice Biennale, the most revered of biennales and a sought-after destination in an artist’s career. Schrag’s pilgrimage is not the type of work usually selected for the Venice Biennale. By journeying to Venice in such a physically demanding manner, questions are raised about the value of different practices in art and communities outside the art world. The project investigates attitudes towards perceived outsiders, and the value of the spiritual goal once attained. The journey to a place of worship is often as significant as the destination. Schrag will meet a number of people on the long route from Huntly to Venice and will collect relics from a community of hosts. A collaborative action, the physical activity of walking together allows people the opportunity for mutual expression. A process through which to explore surroundings and to share with others, walking is an active engagement with place and people; it is an organic medium for an artist to use. Schrag looks to examine where we fit in the world, different communities, beliefs and values, the concept of a sacred place, and how all of this relates to the lives of the people he meets along the way. Deveron Arts has scheduled an event at the Edinburgh Art Festival 2015 to contextualise this exploration and to open it up to the general public. The Way to Venice, held at St. Patrick’s Church and co-curated by Nick Wong, will allow the audience to 42 | ART

partake in Schrag’s experience as he skypes in from his location on the route to discuss important concepts raised by his journey. Barbara Steveni (Shadow Curator for Lure of the Lost), Lucy Byatt (Director at Hospitalfield Arts and Curator for the 2015 representation of Scotland + Venice) and Philip Kerr (St. Patrick’s Monsignor) will be in conversation with the artist. David Harding, founder of the Environmental Arts course at Glasgow School of Art, will chair the event. Participants will be encouraged to join a short pilgrimage to Rosslyn Chapel the next day. Schrag and Deveron Arts are preparing for this demanding and multilayered project throughout May. The role of hospitality in the pilgrimage is significant. If anyone would like to become involved in the project’s community, either by walking with Schrag or offering him a place to stay, please get in touch with Deveron Arts. Contact details and a route map can be found at deveron-arts.com Claudia Zeiske is the Founding Director of Deveron Arts Contemporary Pilgrimage: The Way to Venice Talk at St Patrick’s Church, Edinburgh: Thu 30 July, 4pm, free admission Walk from St Anthony’s Ruined Chapel to Rosslyn Chapel: Fri 31 July, 10am (c.5 hours) £5 (including map). Book at deveron-arts.com

Image courtesy of the artist

STUDIO OF OBJECTS Chris Horrocks

Tracing the development of a digital 3D version of Eduardo Paolozzi’s studio. How can social-media technology enable people to explore preserved artists’ studios and archives? This question led to major research funded by the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts, enabling partners film production company hijack, creative communications agency Dacapo, Kingston University and app design studio Touchpress to embark on a year-long project called Studio of Objects to create a digital 3D version of artist Eduardo Paolozzi’s studio. The team captured the space using 360-degree laser scanning and photogrammetry – the use of photography to ascertain measurements between objects – and is developing an app to enable tablet users to interact with the space. On view to the public at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, the preserved studio contains many hundreds of objects that Paolozzi (1924–2005) collected and made. It is a crowded but carefully arranged accumulation of plaster casts, wax moulds, a tin aeroplane and ship, model kits, art books, toy robots, a bust of Albert Einstein, dummy heads, boxed games and models of his major sculptures, such as Newton (1988) and Mr Cruikshank (1950). The studio inventory lists 1,894 objects, but does not include the books, postcards and many other items that line the walls and crowd the shelves above the bed on the raised platform where Paolozzi rested after long periods of work. The challenge for hijack and its partners was to find ways for audiences to navigate this environment and be able to connect it to Paolozzi’s art and life. The first difficulty was to work out how to use the latest visual capture technology to make a navigable 3D image that was not only sufficiently detailed but could also run effectively on a tablet. Touchpress wrote groundbreaking code to solve this problem. Paolozzi would have been interested in the advanced research that takes his work as the focus. Technology and the processes of montage and assemblage lay at the core of his art and vision of the world. The method of digitising the studio involved a technique similar to his own: the splicing of many

Image courtesy of Studio of Objects

different elements to produce a coherent composition. The early data cloud visuals of the laser scan invoke the saturated colours of Paolozzi’s screen prints of the 1960s, or the mosaic forms of his partly removed art at Tottenham Court Road, the model for which lies under his studio bunk bed, now safely captured by the research team. The team has also made connections between items in the studio to build narratives of Paolozzi’s work and life. For example, there are links between the unopened boxes of plaster, the circuitry of a radio, wax casts and the detail on some of the artist’s figurative sculptures that reveal his working methods in combining technology, sculpture and the human figure. The project has encountered some significant challenges, not least the need to perform scanning in such a fragile space, to ‘crunch’ the many millions of points of data into a workable size and to visualise the studio in a way sympathetic to Paolozzi’s world. Hopefully, the results give visitors a real sense of the artist’s studio and the stories it contains, and provide the means to capture other spaces and lives in the future. studioofobjects.com Chris Horrocks is Associate Professor in the School of Art & Design History at Kingston University, and Course Director of the MA in Art & Design History Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 43

Rachael Cloughton

RECENT ACQUISITIONS 44 | ART

Scottish Art News highlights new additions to permanent collections across Scotland and exciting acquisitions of Scottish art further afield. 1

3 The University of Stirling Art Collection Glasgow Museums has secured Glasgow now includes the work Where is the Fourth Fair (1832), a long-lost oil painting by Paisley-born Dimension? by Kate Thomson (b.1961), one of the artist John Knox (1778–1845). The ambitious artwork founding directors of the Glasgow Sculpture Studios. portrays the Glasgow Fair on Glasgow Green in the th Thomson makes sculptures that are abstracted from early 19 century. It captures the city on the eve of the human form and landscape. The University of expansion, when trade, art, commerce and enterprise Stirling’s work is located outside the university’s were flourishing. Over a thousand figures make up Cottrell Building and is beautifully crafted from the scene; Knox captures all – the rich and poor, the Italian Lasa marble. privileged, soldiers, street vendors and beggars – in this lively and humorous composition. The purchase Paisley Museum now holds in its collection was made with the support of the National Lottery 4 the ceramic sculpture Cuvette à Tombeau (2012) by through the Heritage Lottery Fund, Trustees of the New York-born artist Francesca DiMattio (b.1981). Hamilton Bequest and Friends of Glasgow Museums. This intricately painted bird-on-branch design The painting is on show at Kelvingrove Art Gallery immediately recalls 18th century Rococo flower vases, and Museum. but then other elements creep into sight, such as Eleven prints from ‘21 Revolutions’, an leopard-print double helix loops and a base that is 2 st exhibition to mark the 21 anniversary of the opening propped up by a powder-pink cushion on stubby feet. of Glasgow Women’s Library, have been acquired by This irreverent and playful work was acquired with Glasgow Museums, and form the basis of a new show help from the Art Fund and the Contemporary Art ‘Ripples on the Pond’ at the Gallery of Modern Art Society and takes its place next to pieces by potters (see pp.57). The Gallery of Modern Art also recently Bernard Leach (1887–1979) and Michael Cardew commissioned American artist Lawrence Weiner (1901–83) in Paisley Museum’s nationally important (b.1942) to embed the works Somewhere / Somehow collection of ceramics. and Along the Way / Come what may in paving stones on Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow. The works, part-funded by the Art Fund, represent the first public commission for GoMA since it opened in 1996.

Two wood/linocuts by Sheila MacFarlane (b.1943), respectively, Finella in the Woods and Finella in the Waterfall (both 1995), are now part of Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums’ collection. These works take the ancient Scottish folk legend of Finella as their subject. Daughter of one of the Earls of Angus, Finella murdered King Kenneth II of Scotland to avenge the death of her only son. In these works, MacFarlane has employed her extensive knowledge and expertise in relief printing to create two large prints telling the story of Finella’s escape from the king’s men.

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Scottish Art News | REGULARS | 47

The Hunterian recently acquired Portrait of family in honour of Sir Patrick Ford, who supported an Artist (Possibly a Self-Portrait) (c.1775), attributed the artist’s visit to Venice in 1910. All three works – to William Doughty (1757–82). The significance of From the Calcina Hotel, On the Canal, Venice and this oil painting lies in the small figure at the bottom Santa Maria della Salute, Venice – were painted right of the canvas: a bronze cast of an anatomical during this trip, which proved to be a pivotal moment model, depicted with the skin removed to reveal the in the artist’s career. While in Venice, Cadell’s underlying muscle structure. The figure was modelled handling of paint became looser and more expressive, on the life-size version made by Dr William Hunter, and he experimented with increasingly vivacious founder of The Hunterian. During Hunter’s tenure as colours, a decision that influenced much of his Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy he was subsequent art. required to provide ‘annually six public lectures in the 8 schools, adapted to the Arts of Design’. The portrait The David Wilkie (1785–1841) painting A will go on display in the museum’s Main Gallery Young Woman Kneeling at a Prayer Desk (1813) is now alongside a bronze cast of the model depicted in the part of the National Gallery’s collection, thanks to the painting, vividly illustrating Hunter’s influence on support of Marcia Lay, an art teacher who taught at students of painting and sculpture in the 1770s and Lordswood Girls’ School, Harborne, for more than 20 beyond. years. Lay died in June 2012, leaving a generous gift to the National Gallery in her will, which fully funded the 7 The Scottish National Gallery of Modern purchase of the painting. The work, thought to be lost Art (SNGMA) has acquired four important artworks for more than 140 years, was recognised as a Wilkie by Scottish sculptor, painter and printmaker William by London-based art dealer Ben Elwes when he saw Turnbull (1922–2012). Two oils on canvas, Untitled it in the catalogue for a sale in New York. The subject (Aquarium) (1950) and 15-1958 (1958), and two bronze of the painting is said to be 1st Earl of Mulgrave’s daughter Lady Augusta Phipps, who died in 1813 aged sculptures, Aquarium (1949) and Acrobat (1951), were just 12. The work was known to exist because it had bought by the gallery in 2014 through the Henry and featured in an oil sketch, Display of Eight Paintings, Sula Walton Fund, with assistance from the Art Fund. that the artist had sent to his brother, Captain Wilkie, They will form part of this year’s memorial display to an army officer in India. celebrate the artist, who died in 2012. SNGMA was recently gifted three significant paintings by Scottish Colourist FCB Cadell (1883– 1937). They were presented by members of the Ford 48 | ART

The McLean Museum and Art Gallery has 11 Former First Minister for Scotland Alex acquired the William Scott (1913–89) painting Breton Salmond recently gifted his portrait by Gerard Landscape. The work belongs to a series painted Burns to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. in 1938/39, when Scott was living in Brittany. He The gallery also received a portrait of actor Alan brought the painting back with him from France, and Cumming by Christian Hook, gifted by Sky Arts it remained with the artist until his death in 1989. It Portrait Artist of the Year. was recently included in a major touring exhibition to Tate St Ives, the Hepworth Wakefield and the Ulster Museum in Belfast, to mark the centenary of Scott’s 7a 1 FCB Cadell, On the Canal, Venice, 1910, John Knox, Glasgow Fair, 1819-22 birth. Scott’s sons, who oversee the William Scott Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection Foundation, decided the work should return to the Presented in 2014 by members of the Ford 2 family, in honour of Sir Patrick Ford Lawrence Weiner, Somewhere/Somehow and artist’s hometown of Greenock, and gifted the work to (1880-1945), who supported Cadell’s visit to Along the way/Come what May embedded Venice in 1910. Photograph by Antonia Reeve in paving stones on Royal Exchange Square, the McLean Museum and Art Gallery earlier this year. Glasgow

Perth Museum and Art Gallery recently acquired Orion (2014) by Alison Watt (b1965). Orion was created for Watt’s first retrospective, ‘Alison Watt Paintings: 1986–2014’, which was shown at the gallery in the summer of 2014. The work exemplifies the artist’s fascination with drapery, a specialism that developed out of her interest in 19th century European art, in particular, the depiction of fabric in the paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867). The acquisition of Orion was funded by the Art Fund, National Fund for Acquisitions and the Hamish McEwan Bequest. It will be on public display for the next three years, and is currently in Perth Museum and Art Gallery’s sculpture court. In 2016, it will be shown at the Fergusson Gallery in the context of Colourist JD Fergusson’s representations of the female form.

3 Kate Thomson, Where is the Fourth Dimension? 4 Francesca DiMattio, Cuvette à Tombeau, 2012, Paisley Museum and Art Galleries, ArtFunded 2014 5a Sheila MacFarlane, Finella Walking in the Trees, 1995, Aberdeen Art Gallery. Purchased in 2014 with the aid of a grant from the National Fund for Acquisitions. © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections 5b Sheila MacFarlane, Finella in the Waterfall 1995, Aberdeen Art Gallery. Purchased in 2014 with the aid of a grant from the National Fund for Acquisitions. © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

7b William Turnbull, Acrobat, 1951 © Estate of William Turnbull. All rights reserved 8 David Wilkie, A Young Woman kneeling at a Prayer Desk, 1813 © The National Gallery, London 9 William Scott, Breton Landscape, 1938/39, © Estate of William Scott 2015

10 Alison Watt, Orion, 2014. Purchased in 2014 with support from the Art Fund, the National Fund for Acquisitions and the Hamish G W MacEwan Bequest. Image is © The Artist and the work will be on display in Perth Museum and Art Gallery throughout the course of 2015 11 Christian Hook, Alan Cumming, 2014, © Sky Arts

6 Attributed to William Doughty, (Portrait of an artist, possibly a self-portrait), c. 1775. Purchased 2014, with support from the Art Fund and the National Fund for Acquisitions. (Statuette) After Michael Henry Spang, Bronze statuette of an anatomical figure, c. 1760. © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2015

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Tim Cornwell

ART MARKET 50 | ART

Scottish Art News traces some of the most significant sales of Scottish art over over the last six months. With its roots as a former corporate collection, the Fleming Collection owes its greatest acquisitions to the astute eye of David Donald, the Bank Director of Flemings, who began buying Scottish work for newly acquired London offices in 1968. Nearly 50 years later, purchases by another financial institution, Aberdeen Asset Management (AAM), the largest fund manager in Europe, are a reminder of how thoughtful corporate collecting benefits buyer and seller. A visit to the Royal Scottish Academy’s (RSA) 188th Annual Exhibition by AAM’s curator paved the way to the purchase of academician Alan Davie’s painting A Temple in the Whiteness, Opus 0.1801 (2005), from the artist’s London dealer Gimpel Fils over the summer of 2014. AAM bought the work of at least four other academicians, the RSA reports, including Frances Convery (b.1956), David Michie (b.1928), and Derrick Guild (b.1963). The latter’s is a dual piece: a painting and an iPad video portrait of Ewen Bremner, the Scottish film actor, which hangs in the company’s Edinburgh offices. Corporate purchases on this scale do not only enliven offices for the employees of the business and visitors or clients alike, they are also potential lifelines for Scottish artists and a welcome mark of recognition beyond public galleries. AAM has been buying, while the Royal Bank of Scotland has been selling works from an art collection that at the height of its expansion contained some 4,000 pieces, many of them Scottish. In the experience of some dealers and artists, the Scottish art market was suffering badly until mid-2014, but in spite of the economic turnaround, the market for more traditional, mid-career Scottish artists remains a hard sell. Artists ‘are having to work a lot harder, think a lot harder and maybe bring their prices down,’

says artist and former Visual Arts Scotland President Diana Hope. High-end contemporary work is represented by Douglas Gordon (b.1966), who last December created a 28,000-square-foot (2,601 sq m) reflective loch at New York’s Park Avenue Armory called tears become…streams become…(2014), and displayed one of his burnt pianos in an accompanying show at the city’s Gagosian Gallery. Elsewhere, at last year’s Frieze London art fair, Work No 489 (2005), 25 rectangles hand-coloured by 25 people, by Martin Creed (b.1968) was on sale with a German gallery for €160,000. A rising name in the Glasgow contemporary scene, sculptor Sara Barker (b.1980), earned a major commission from Jupiter Artland in Edinburgh. The permanent, large-scale outdoor work will go on show this summer, and is made from layered wood and steel, building on a temporary piece she showed in 2013 as part of the Edinburgh Art Fair. More conventional blue-chip art also has pulling power: The Scottish Gallery’s 2014 Edinburgh Art Festival show of Victoria Crowe (b.1945) was one of its most successful ever, selling 46 of 59 works. ‘It was a tour de force, had the festival audience and just got in before the referendum miseries took hold of the whole country,’ said Director Guy Peploe. ‘The return of bonuses to the city in January helped us to sell some high-value work at the beginning of the year. In general, it is a conservative market looking for fresh work and top-quality examples: if you have the work to present, it will do well; other things, however worthy, particularly without forceful marketing, can disappear without trace.’ Crowe’s Large Tree Group Tapestry (2013), created at the Dovecot Studios and featured in Scottish Art News’ autumn 2014 issue, was acquired and gifted to National Museums Scotland by Sir Angus Grossart.

In a new development worth noting for Scottish collectors, The Scottish Gallery staged its first photography show, by David Eustace (b.1961). His portrait photography of artist John Byrne (b.1940) is in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and at the show’s close there were four red dots beside one of the most prominent pieces in the show, Four Steel Workers (2011). The gallery is now planning a survey of Scottish photography; Scotland has lagged behind London and Europe in both private gallery shows and publications on photography, in spite of formidable talents. At the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh, landscape photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper (b.1946) exhibited in late 2014; ‘Scattered Waters: Sources Streams Rivers.’ Photographs from this series were shown at the Fleming Collection in London earlier this year (February–April). Ingleby Gallery Director Richard Ingleby said the show was a ‘tremendous success’. It reflected 32 years of work by the California-born founding Head of Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art, and sales were made to significant private collections in the UK, Europe, Asia and the USA, and to the prestigious Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. In a group Ingleby show, ‘ABJAD’, the maverick and deeply original talent of Edinburgh artist Kevin Harman (b.1982) found a new outlet. In 2010, Harman famously ‘stole’ 210 Edinburgh doormats for his MFA work Love thy Neighbour to concoct a ‘shared crisis among neighbours’. At Ingleby, his beautiful piece Obscure Outing (2014), created using a double-glazing unit and household paint, sold to Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums.

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At Edinburgh’s Open Eye Gallery, landscapes by artist Chris Bushe (b.1958) – thick impastos of Colonsay or Iona – fared so well last year, selling about 75 per cent, that the gallery is working towards a big exhibition in 2016. The late John Bellany’s wife, Helen, meanwhile, is working with the gallery to curate a major festival exhibition of his work this year, after continuing strong sales of his work. The Fine Art Society in Edinburgh has seen strong sales of works by Sam Bough (1822–78) and John Duncan (1866–1945). ‘From time to time [we] get bigger important paintings by Scottish artists like John Duncan; these are the things that our business is based on and now we are easily finding buyers for our pictures,’ says Director Emily Walsh. ‘Since early summer last year things have picked up and there is enough confidence now to know that a good painting will find a home.’ Bough’s Edinburgh from St. Anthony’s Chapel (c.1854) sold for £14,000 and his On the River Orwell for £7,500, while Duncan’s The Unicorns (1933) went for £25,000. On the auction front, 2015 sees Sotheby’s revive a dedicated sale for Scottish art, four years after Scottish works were folded into British and Irish sales. Ahead of a London sale, the pieces will be shown in Scotland, but the event will not rival the once-famous Gleneagles sale extravaganzas. Sotheby’s hopes to include works by Alison Watt (b.1965) and Callum Innes (b.1962). In December 2014, Sotheby’s sold Iona Looking Towards Mull by FCB Cadell (1883–1937) for £86,500, double its low estimate. But, the expertise of André Zlattinger, Head of 20th Century British Art 54 | ART

at Christie’s, seems to have kept Christie’s one step ahead of its rival in big Scottish sales. In November, Christie’s sold Poise (1916) by Colourist John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961) for £638,500 – five times the estimate and a world-record price. The Sotheby’s Scottish sale will lower the entrance price for Scottish work at its auctions; Christie’s, on the other hand, is sticking to a strategy of ‘presenting modern Scottish art within a broader international perspective,’ says Zlattinger. ‘The market for contemporary Scottish art continues to be very strong, with stellar works by the likes of Peter Doig (b.1959), Gerald Laing (1936–2011) and Anya Gallaccio (b.1963) selling on the international world stage.’ At Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh, a pair of chairs designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) went far over estimate at £37,460. Offered alongside several of his works, a powerful but unheralded self-portrait of World War I Official War Artist Sir Muirhead Bone, estimated at £1,000 to £1,500, went for a striking £8,750. Tim Cornwell is an arts journalist working from Edinburgh and Istanbul

‘ From time to time [we] get bigger important paintings by Scottish artists like John Duncan; these are the things that our business is based on and now we are easily finding buyers for our pictures’

1 Alan Davie, A Temple in the Whiteness, Opus 0.1801, 2005. Courtesy of the Royal Scottish Academy 5

2 Kevin Harman, Obscure Outing I, 2014. Courtesy of Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh 3 Thomas Joshua Cooper, Diamond Rock – The River Findhorn – The Findhorn Gorge, Morayshire, Scotland, 1997-2014. Courtesy of the Artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

4 John Duncan, The Unicorns, 1933. Courtesy of the Fine Art Society, Edinburgh 5 Charles Rennie Mackintosh, ‘Ladderback’ Chairs, 1903. Courtesy of Lyon and Turnbull 6 John Duncan Fergusson, Poise, 1916. © Christie’s Images Limited 2014 7 Sam Bough, On the River Orwell. Courtesy of the Fine Art Society, Edinburgh

8 Sam Bough, Edinburgh from St Anthony’s Chapel, c.1854. Courtesy of the Fine Art Society, Edinburgh

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Laura MacCulloch

PRIVATE VIEW 56 | ART

Spring in the Alps (Spring Blossoms to the Mountain Snows) 1910 Sir David Murray (1849–1933) Oil on canvas 137.1 x 167.8 cm Acc. no.: P1614

Our new feature spotlights Scottish works in collections across the UK. For this issue, Laura MacCulloch, Curator at Royal Holloway, University of London, has selected Sir David Murray’s painting Spring in the Alps. As I write, this year’s spring is battling winter, with snow forecast for Scotland (in spite of the emergence of daffodils and crocuses here in Surrey), so it seems appropriate to choose Sir David Murray’s painting Spring in the Alps (Spring Blossoms to the Mountain Snows) from our collection. This peaceful alpine scene contrasts bursts of cherry blossom and a clear blue sky with the magnificent, but snowy, mountains in the background. Murray was a prolific landscape painter and examples of his work can be found in galleries across the UK. He was made a full member of the Royal Academy in 1905 and was knighted in 1918. However, he came from a humble background and securing his high position in the British art world required dedication, patience and tenacity. He was unable to leap straight into a career as an artist and so began his working life with a steady day job. For 11 years he juggled working in a mercantile firm with evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art. In 1875, he finally left his job to become a fully fledged artist and quickly won high regard, becoming an associate member of the Royal Scottish Academy just six years later. By 1882, he felt confident enough to move to London. We have recently conserved Spring in the Alps and in the process uncovered just how successful Murray became. The painting is very large and I had never been able to see the reverse, so getting it out of storage presented a wonderful opportunity to look at

it properly. On arrival in the conservation studio, the painting caused excitement as the conservator, Sophie Reddington, identified that Murray had used ‘blind stretchers’ on the reverse of the canvas. These wooden boards maintained tension and prevented the canvas from sagging, but were not in common use. It seems that by 1910 Murray was wealthy enough to be able to use the most advanced painting equipment. These findings are confirmed by the inscription on the stretchers: ‘By David Murray RA 1 Langham Chambers, Portland Place’. The address is significant as it was Sir John Everett Millais’s former studio. Looking at a portrait (c.1890, National Galleries of Scotland) by John Pettie (1839–93) depicting Murray with a wonderfully flamboyant moustache, it seems that Murray maintained a fashionable studio at Langham Chambers in which he played the role of a bohemian artist. There is another portrait of Murray from around the same time by James Archer (1823–1904), also in the National Galleries of Scotland, which shows a much more sober and serious man. This second portrait suggests that in spite of his success and his flamboyant urban persona, here was a man who found in nature the tranquillity portrayed in Spring in the Alps. Dr Laura MacCulloch is curator at Royal Holloway, University of London

Ripples on the Pond PREVIEWS

Rachael Cloughton

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Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Glasgow 1 May 2015–3 April 2016 ‘Ripples on the Pond’ is a major exhibition of works by women artists held within the Glasgow Museums’ Collection (GMC). It takes as its starting point the collection’s recent acquisition from the Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) of 11 works by such artists as Claire Barclay (b.1968), Ciara Phillips (b.1976) and Lucy Skaer (b.1975) from the ‘21 Revolutions’ series, a body of artwork created in 2011/12 by women artists in response to GWL’s archives and collections. For Katie Bruce, Curator of ‘Ripples on the Pond’, the acquisitions prompted her to reflect on other works made by women in the collection. ‘Themes of play, landscape, feminism, place and visibility emerged,’ explains Bruce. ‘As the exhibition came into being, I learned more about the works in the collection and developed an understanding of the genealogy of practice, both locally and internationally, of women artists living and working in Glasgow.’

Some of the works in the show

have never before been exhibited at GoMA, including pieces by Joan Eardley (1921–63), Barbara Hepworth (1903–75) and Vanessa Bell (1879–1961). ‘It has been a joy to uncover works held between acid-free tissue paper in Salander conservation boxes, often unseen in public for a number of years, and place them alongside recent acquisitions,’ elaborates Bruce. She has selected two mediums for contemplation in the show: paper and moving image. ‘I am keen to explore how women use paper as part of their significant practice and, for “Ripples on the Pond”, paper can also mean photography,’ she explains. ‘One aim is that by exploring one medium you gain an insight into another.’ The Modern Edinburgh Film School and LUX Scotland were invited to develop the moving-image aspect of the show and programme artists’ screenings throughout the exhibition run. The film component should be understood as a sister essay, ‘responding to, commenting on, critiquing the holdings

‘ It has been a joy to uncover works held between acid-free tissue paper in Salander conservation boxes, often unseen in public for a number of years, and place them alongside recent acquisitions’ Scottish Art News | PREVIEWS | 57

and re-imagining a collection through conversations with other works,’ says Bruce. Works by Corin Sworn (b.1976), Anne Colvin, Sarah Forrest (b.1981) and Anne-Marie Copestake will form part of this conversation – as will visitors, who are invited to ‘read, re-read, critique’ the works, generating further ripples of ideas and interpretations upon each new encounter. Running until early 2016, the show will usher in GoMA’s twentieth year. ‘It is a lovely exhibition to start a conversation around the works the city holds in its collection,’ says Bruce, ‘and how it might like to strengthen the collection in the future.’

Rachael Cloughton is editor of Scottish Art News Gallery of Modern Art, Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow, G1 3AH T: (0)141 287 3050 Open: Monday to Wednesday and Saturday 10am–5pm, Thursday 10am–8pm, Friday and Sunday 11am–5pm

1 Jo Spence in collaboration with Terry Dennett, From The Final Project, Return to Nature (Version Two), 1991–92. © The Artist’s Estate 2 Helen de Main, January 1987, from 21 Spare Ribs, 2012. © The Artist 3 Jo Spence in collaboration with David Roberts What 1991 looked like most of the time, 1991. © The Artist’s Estate

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Artist Rooms: Joseph Beuys Neil Cooper

Timespan, Helmsdale, Sutherland 5 June–6 September 2015 When Richard Demarco brought Joseph Beuys to Edinburgh College of Art as part of the 1970 Edinburgh International Festival exhibition of iconoclastic contemporary German artists, ‘Strategy: Get Arts’, it fostered a relationship between Beuys and Scotland that impacted and influenced both ever after. The latest encounter comes in one of the National Galleries of Scotland’s ongoing series of touring shows, ‘Artist Rooms’, and puts some of Beuys’ fat-and-felt-based work into Timespan, the only public contemporary art gallery in Sutherland. Given Beuys’ focus on the environment and notions of community, the connection with a relatively isolated village such as Helmsdale is clear. As Timespan Curator Frances Davis explains: ‘For us, it makes perfect sense, not only to do with the symbolic properties of fat and felt in terms of nourishment and warmth, but also to do with the engagement with the materials in general. There is a real kind of social, political

and ecological strain running through all of Beuys’ practice that is still relevant today, particularly in terms of what it means to present the work in a small rural community and how that community works together.’ To highlight Beuys’ continuing influence, Timespan will be appointing an as yet unannounced artist in residence, who will take up his or her post a month prior to the Beuys show, working in situ throughout its run. A one-day symposium will also take place, bringing together some of the show’s concerns and opening them out in an ongoing dialogue that remains at the heart of Beuys’ notion of social sculpture. ‘We accept that there might not be a wide knowledge about Beuys’ work,’ concedes Davis, ‘so bringing in a contemporary artist to respond to the work before the show opens is a way of looking at how Beuys has a continuing influence on contemporary artistic practice. It is also about building a relationship with the local community, whereby a contemporary artist

can build a larger conversation and sense of anticipation before the exhibition opens.’ ‘One of the great things about the “Artist Rooms” project,’ Davis observes, ‘is that it recognises the importance of how work by artists like Beuys can relate to and is relevant to areas outside a Central Belt context. Our audience is very seasonal, and that in itself affects how our work is seen. Beuys’ influence on art goes beyond art itself, and in its social and environmental concerns looks at important questions about how we live.’ Neil Cooper is a writer and critic on theatre, music and art Timespan, Dunrobin Street, Helmsdale, Sutherland, KW8 6JA T: (0)1431 821 327 | timespan.org.uk For opening hours, please see the website 1 Joseph Beuys, Fettstuhl (Fat Chair), 1964 – 1985. © National Galleries of Scotland and Tate

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William Gear Sara Cooper

Towner, Eastbourne, 17 July–27 September 2015 City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 24 October 2015–14 February 2016 Timed to coincide with the centenary of his birth, this major retrospective repositions Fife-born artist William Gear in his rightful place as one of the most advanced and innovative British abstract painters of his generation. The show will trace Gear’s influence, from his association in the 1940s with CoBrA – an international group of artists inspired by Expressionism and the art of children – through the radical, abstract compositions of the 1950s to the energy of his mature style from the 1960s until his death in 1997. It will include the important painting Autumn Landscape (1950), for which Gear controversially won the Festival of Britain purchase prize in 1951, as well as such key works as Summer Fête (1951) and a selection of the Sculpture Project paintings of 1952. Also on display will be the exuberant paintings Vertical Feature (1961) and Broken Yellow (1967). His early talent for drawing was encouraged, and his first gallery visit to 60 | ART

the Kirkcaldy Art Gallery soon after it opened cemented his interest in painting. After studies at Edinburgh College of Art, Gear secured a travelling scholarship and spent significant time in Paris working with Fernand Léger (1881–1955). He travelled widely during World War II, including a stint with the Monuments Men, but returned to Paris in 1947. In 1949, Gear’s work was shown in New York at the Betty Parsons Gallery, alongside Jackson Pollock (1912–56). He settled back in the UK in 1950, but continued to exhibit widely internationally, including shows in Japan and at the Venice Biennale. In the early days of the British Abstract art revival of the late 1940s, Gear was the movement’s key protagonist, through his important connection with Europe and the USA, as well as a drive and ambition few could match. The exhibition has been developed as a partnership between two places with strong links to Gear:

Edinburgh, the city in which he studied, and Eastbourne, where, from 1958 to 1964, Gear was an influential curator at Towner. He left a great legacy in Towner’s permanent collection, adding to its diversity and modernity through the acquisition of paintings by many of the major British Abstract artists of the 1950s and 1960s, including Sandra Blow (1925–2006), Alan Davie (1920–2014), Roger Hilton (1911–75) and Ceri Richards (1903–71), as well as a large number of prints by both young and established printmakers of the period. Following his time in Eastbourne, Gear was appointed Head of Fine Art at Birmingham College of Art, and moved with his family to the Midlands. He became an important part of the city’s cultural and artistic life, mentoring and encouraging young artists while continuing his own works, which were at the forefront of experimentation in both oils and works on paper.

1 William Gear, Summer Fete, 1951. City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries 2 William Gear, Vertical Feature, 1950. © The Artist’s Estate. Image courtesy Towner, Eastbourne

This centenary exhibition will show the pinnacle of the artist’s output – strong colour works and structural features – while clearly articulating Gear’s development through the various stages of a long and prolific career. Sara Cooper is Head of Collections at Towner, Eastbourne Towner, Devonshire Park, College Road, Eastbourne, BN21 4JJ T: (0)1323 434 670 townereastbourne.org.uk Open: Tuesday to Sunday 10am–5pm

City Art Centre, 2 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DE T: (0)131 529 3993 edinburghmuseums.org.uk/Venues/ City-Art-Centre Open: Monday to Saturday 10am–5pm, Sunday 12–5pm

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The Improbable City Neil Cooper

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Edinburgh Art Festival, various venues, 30 July–30 August 2015 Charles Avery exhibition, the Ingleby Gallery, 30 July–26 September 2015 There was a moment during the 2014 Edinburgh Art Festival when Festival Director Sorcha Carey found herself sitting above the city’s old Royal High School, where work by Amar Kanwar (b.1964) and Shilpa Gupta (b.1976) was being shown inside the Neoclassical Greek Revival creation built between 1825 and 1929 by architect Thomas Hamilton. Vidya Shivadas, the Indian curator beside Carey looked out at the city’s panoramic view. ‘Sorcha,’ Carey remembers Shivadas saying, ‘you live in a picture postcard.’ This confirmed something Carey had always thought. ‘Edinburgh as a city has a vocabulary of the imagination,’ she replied. ‘There is something profoundly fairytaleish about it. There is a magic castle and at times it looks like a dark kingdom.’ Out of this exchange has come ‘The Improbable City’, a series of seven public art commissions for this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival. Brand 62 | ART

new interventions by artists including Charles Avery (b.1973) and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (b.1973) are set to be situated in some of the city’s more interesting locales. The initiative also found inspiration in Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino’s 1972 volume, in which explorer Marco Polo describes a series of 55 cities to ageing emperor Kublai Khan. As the men talk, it becomes clear that the cities Polo is depicting are imaginary. Each brief prose poem in the book is categorised into 11 groups. Where the cities Dorothea and Anastasia come under Cities & Desire, Melania and Adelma are collected under Cities & the Dead. Other groups are Thin Cities, Continuous Cities and Hidden Cities. All of which sounds tailor-made for Avery, whose entire practice is focused on a fictional island. He explains: ‘The capital city, port and gateway to this imagined world is called Onomatopoeia. The project I have in mind could be read as an export from that

territory, a specimen from that city, the meaning of which is to illuminate and articulate the urban environment. A gift from the great Khan of Onomatopoeia to Edinburgh.’ The space in which we hope to situate the work has unique properties in terms of building type, and is ideally suited to what I want to bring about. It represents a challenge, which initially I was reticent about, but which I have now embraced, and I hope the work will, too. But this thing is an export from another imagined culture. It is not specifically reactive to the city of Edinburgh, but it will engage with its environment, rather like a recently landed alien spacecraft involved in a period of pre-contact surveillance. By the end of the festival, dogs will be lifting their legs on it. Edinburgh Art Festival’s previous commissions have already left a permanent mark on the city, from the multi-hued marble of Work No. 1059 by Martin Creed (b.1968), a Fruitmarket

1 Marvin Gaye Chetwynd 2 Amar Kanwar, The Sovereign Forest, 2011- 2014, The Old Royal High School, photograph by Stuart Armitt, courtesy of Edinburgh Art Festival 3 Charles Avery, Detail of Untitled (Dancers outside the MoA, Onomatopoeia), 2012, Image courtesy of the artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh 4 Shilpa Gupta, Where do I end and you begin, 2012, The Old Royal High School, photograph by Stuart Armitt, courtesy of Edinburgh Art Festival

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‘ I hope the overriding legacy of “The Improbable City” is to engage the present with the past. We think of history as being in the past, but for the next generation to keep hold of that history, and to connect the past, present and future, we have to find a meaning for that history in the present that we live in’

Gallery commission that revitalised the Scotsman Steps in 2011, to Regent Bridge by Callum Innes (b.1962), a light-based work commissioned by EAF and the Ingleby Gallery in 2012. Based beneath Archibald Elliot’s Regent Bridge designed in 1814 to create an entrance to Edinburgh where London Road met the New Town, Innes’s piece floods the normally dark tunnel on Calton Road with light to expose its architectural beauty, and the installation has remained in place ever since. Carey also points to Daughters of Decayed Tradesmen, the 2013 commission by Christine Borland (b.1965) and Brody Condon (b.1974), which was housed in the burnt-out watchtower of New Calton Burial Ground. ‘We had to clear out the entire building and put a roof on it to make it sage,’ Carey explains. ‘So, even though the artwork was not permanent, the fact that we had to do that has left its mark.’ ‘The Improbable City’ comes at a time when the shape of the real-life Edinburgh, along with other cities, is 64 | ART

undoubtedly changing. With property developers having already bulldozed significant artistic landmarks and places where the imagination could run riot, such as the original multi-purpose Bongo Club on New Street, which has left a gap site for more than a decade, such changes have not always been a good thing. The old Royal High School itself, where the idea for ‘The Improbable City’ was partly hatched, and which was once mooted to house the Scottish Parliament, has come under scrutiny following proposals by developers to convert it into a luxury hotel. This has been followed by a less destructive counter proposal from St Mary’s Music School to become its new premises. Urban regeneration, however, is not in ‘The Improbable City’s’ blueprint. Carey says: ‘I hope the overriding legacy of “The Improbable City” is to engage the present with the past. We think of history as being in the past, but for the next generation to keep hold of that history,

and to connect the past, present and future, we have to find a meaning for that history in the present that we live in. I hope that by inviting contemporary artists to create new work like this in the city, we can go some way towards doing that.’ Neil Cooper is a writer and critic on theatre, music and art ‘The Improbable City’ runs as part of Edinburgh Art Festival at various venues, 30 July–30 August. Charles Avery has a solo exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, 30 July–26 September. edinburghartfestival.com

Scottish Artists 1750–1900: From Caledonia to the Continent David Pollock

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The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh 6 August 2015–7 February 2016 For the Edinburgh Festival exhibition this year, The Queen’s Gallery at the Palace of Holyroodhouse has chosen to showcase works from the Royal Collection by Scottish artists, taking in a centuryand-a-half of pieces commissioned and purchased by monarchs. ‘Various monarchs throughout the years have collected Scottish artists,’ says Deborah Clarke, Curator at The Queen’s Gallery, ‘starting here with George III, who was painted by the Edinburgh artist Allan Ramsay (1713–84). Ramsay was influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment and he travelled the Continent before settling in London, where he became painter at court to King George III.’ It is a similar tale to the Fife-born, Edinburgh-educated Sir David Wilkie (1785–1841), who followed the same career path before coming into the service of George IV. ‘Scottish origins and a cultured breadth of education thanks to their travels on the Continent unite the artists

here. The exotic influences are there in the royal family portraits by Ramsay and Wilkie,’ elaborates Clarke. These influences are also apparent in the work of the artists that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – noted for their love of Scotland – collected. ‘There was a particular group of painters appreciated by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who travelled abroad,’ explains Clarke, ‘like David Roberts (1796–1864), who visited Egypt, the Holy Land and Spain; and a real favourite was John Phillip (1817–67) from Aberdeen, who was known as ‘Spanish’ Phillip. The Queen and Prince gave each other pictures as presents, and she particularly liked Phillip’s bright, vibrant images of Spain.’ Other artists favoured by the royal couple included Aberdeen-born James Giles (1801–70) and Oban’s Kenneth MacLeay (1802–78), who were engaged to record the landscape and people of the Balmoral Estate.

These and around another 20 artists will feature in an exhibition that displays in the region of 70 pieces, including drawings, watercolours and a small number of items of furniture and sculpture. ‘I would not say that it is a definitive collection of Scottish art from the time,’ says Clarke, ‘it more reflects the tastes of the monarchs during this era. Yet it is an interesting story to tell, not only of the travels of these artists overseas and the influences they gathered, but also of how these works were appreciated by the royals.’ David Pollock is an arts writer and journalist based in Edinburgh

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1 Allan Ramsay, George III, c.1761-2. © Royal Collection Trust & Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015 2 Allan Ramsay, Queen Charlotte with her two Eldest Sons, c.1764 -9. © Royal Collection Trust & Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015 3 David Wilkie, The Penny Wedding, 1818. © Royal Collection Trust & Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015

The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Canongate, The Royal Mile, Edinburgh, EH8 8DX Open daily: April to October 9.30am–6pm; November to March 9.30am–4.30pm royalcollection.org.uk/visit/the-queensgallery-palace-of-holyroodhouse

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Arthur Melville David Pollock

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Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh 10 October 2015–17 January 2016 Throughout the autumn, the lower galleries at the Royal Scottish Academy building of the Scottish National Gallery will host an Arthur Melville retrospective. The Scottish painter was born in Loanhead-of-Guthrie, Forfarshire, in 1855 and raised amid the scenic landscape of East Linton, East Lothian. His work and his breadth of well-travelled perspective has earned him a prominent reputation as a 19th century British watercolourist, in spite of his untimely death from typhoid in 1904. ‘The idea for the exhibition arose when the gallery acquired a very important late oil by Melville entitled The Chalk Cutting (1898) in 2013,’ explains Senior Curator Charlotte Topsfield. ‘It is a really fascinating picture, a magical view of a chalk quarry, which shows off his brushwork and an interesting line, creating almost abstract patterns. It is an incredibly modernist picture.’

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The delight with the piece inspired the National Galleries to consider this retrospective, coupled with the fact that Melville had not had a solo show in Scotland for many decades. ‘Yet, his watercolours, which appeared in the Glasgow Boys show at Kelvingrove Museum in 2010, were a highlight of the exhibition,’ says Topsfield, ‘although the last solo Melville show in Scotland was in Dundee in 1978–79. He is long overdue a retrospective and a spectacular publication about his work.’ The natural vividness of Melville’s ability with colour and tone was complemented by extensive travel throughout his short life, opening his eyes to new vistas and ways of viewing the world. Having worked in France, Spain, Egypt, Morocco, and the cities of Baghdad, Karachi and Constantinople, he produced such diverse pieces as the bright and alluring The Sapphire Sea (1892), set in

Spain, and the murky mystery of An Arab Interior (1881), set in Cairo, both of which will be exhibited in the show. ‘His work is incredibly attractive,’ says Topsfield, clearly enthused and excited by the pieces she is gathering together from public and private collections. ‘He was innovative and radical in his use of intense light and in the way his compositions were very dramatic. They are stunning works, and we wanted to make them better known. He is a significant artist, and he deserves to be remembered as one of the most important British watercolourists of the 19th century. More than that, he led a very exciting life, a story that also deserves to be told. His travel journal reads like a Boy’s Own adventure novel.’

1 Arthur Melville, The Sapphire Sea, 1892. Private collection 2 Arthur Melville, An Arab Interior, 1881. Scottish National Gallery. Bequest of Sir James Lewis Caw 1951. Photo © National Galleries of Scotland 3 Arthur Melville, The Chalk Cutting, 1898. Scottish National Gallery. Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund and the Patrons of the National Galleries of Scotland 2013. Photo © National Galleries of Scotland

David Pollock is an arts writer and journalist based in Edinburgh The Fleming Collection have loaned three watercolours by Arthur Melville to the Scottish National Gallery for this exhibition: A Cairo Street, (1883); Orange Market, Puerta de Los Pasajes, (1892) and Highland Glen. Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL T: (0)131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org Open daily, 10am–5pm, 7pm on Thursday

‘ It is a really fascinating picture, a magical view of a chalk quarry, which shows off his brushwork and an interesting line, creating almost abstract patterns. It is an incredibly modernist picture’

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Luc Tuymans: The Tyranny of Images Bill Hare

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Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh October–December 2015 Undoubtedly one of the most keenly anticipated highlights of the coming year is the Luc Tuymans exhibition at the Talbot Rice Gallery. It will be the first occasion that this highly respected, internationally successful artist (b.1958) will show a body of recent and new work at a Scottish gallery. As is Tuymans’ usual practice, the exhibition will have a unifying theme to it; in this case, it is linked to his long-standing admiration of the portraits of Sir Henry Raeburn (1756– 1823) and their complex relationship with the history of the Scottish Enlightenment. The first encounter Tuymans had with the portraiture of Raeburn was when he saw one of his paintings as a teenager on a visit to a Ghent museum in his native Belgium. The experience never left him, and ultimately led to the artist visiting Scotland during the lead-up to last year’s independence referendum to see the University of Edinburgh’s celebrated collection of Raeburn’s superb portraits of its own elite academic members of the 70 | ART

Enlightenment. As a result of his renewed contact with the Scottish master, Tuymans has already produced three responses: his own versions of Principal William Robertson and Professors John Robison and John Playfair. His tightly compressed, highly intense studies focus only on the sitters’ severely pared-back facial features, and were shown in a recent exhibition entitled ‘The Shore’ at the David Zwirner Gallery in London, which also included other works inspired by Raeburn’s great contemporary, Spanish Romantic painter Francisco Goya (1746–1825). This painterly dialogue with the past has always been a dominant feature in Tuymans’ investigatory art, as exemplified by his dispassionate interpretations of such horrendous and tragic events as European imperialism and the Holocaust. Now, with his interest in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, he is able to revisit the birth of our modern world and examine painting’s crucially important role in witnessing and visually

(re)presenting this momentous historical event. For artists like Raeburn and Goya, it was a challenging role, requiring them not only to be pictorial chroniclers of their revolutionary era, but also to be inventive conveyors of the era’s radical new ideals concerning the self, individuality and originality. Today in our postmodern, multimedia, mass culture, such concepts are treated with great suspicion and scepticism; so, instead of Raeburn and Goya, we now have such an artist as Tuymans, who, although a figurative painter, is ironically ‘deeply distrustful of images’. With such an attitude, presumably Tuymans concurs with his fellow countryman that ‘This is not a pipe’, and is committed to examine all the ramifications that arose from René Magritte’s pictorial meditation on the unstable relationship between image and representation. Thus, it will be fascinating to see what this contemporary artist, who until now rarely paints faces, will make

1 Luc Tuymans, John Playfair, 2014. Courtesy of David Zwirner 2 Luc Tuymans, John Robinson, 2014. Courtesy of David Zwirner 3 Luc Tuymans, William Robertson, 2014. Courtesy of David Zwirner

of an earlier portraitist who celebrated an age and society that firmly believed ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ that’. Bill Hare is a curator, writer and Honorary Teaching Fellow in Scottish Art History at the University of Edinburgh Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh, EH8 9YL T: (0)131 650 2210 | ed.ac.uk/about/ museums-galleries/talbot-rice Open: Tuesday to Friday 10am–5pm, Saturday 12–5pm

‘ The first encounter Tuymans had with the portraiture of Raeburn was when he saw one of his paintings as a teenager on a visit to a Ghent museum in his native Belgium. The experience never left him’ Scottish Art News | PREVIEWS | 71

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Please check our website for events including… Tapestry weaving course Saturday 23 May, 11am-5pm For ages 18 years+ Beginner–advanced Friends £70; Non-friends £80 This exciting taster day workshop is suitable for those returning after studying on a previous class with the tutor and for complete beginners. Set in the gallery students will enjoy drawing inspiration from the latest exhibitions whilst learning how to weave a tapestry using woollen threads in mixed colours. Caron Penney has been producing tapestries for over 20 years and is a Master Tapestry Weaver. Life Drawing Fortnightly sessions, Thursdays, 6.30-8pm 21 May, 4 & 18 June £15/£10 members or students, bookings essential Informal guided sessions with Scottish artist Janet Casey. You will be using various materials and exploring traditional and contemporary life drawing techniques.

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