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. But, our gran worked in the jute mills and our grandad worked for publishers DC Thomson. Dundee is in our blood. So we made a conscious decision to stay. It lies very close to the secondary school we went to and we found ourselves drawn to it. There are lots of ancient graves with skull-andcrossbone headstones.
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. 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.
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.
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. 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.
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. 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 ideas are quite similar to the themes in our degree show, but I think they are much more mature and better thought out.
How is it for you? And, how did this working relationship evolve? Our degree show was the first time we showed work together. We disliked, well, we hated each other when we first went to art school, but over time we learned to bring ideas together. Yeah, as in any relationship we have our ups and our downs.
People often ask us: 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. Tuesday to Saturday 10am—5. 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. Some of it is dazzling — fizzing with ideas and executed with originality — while some is inaccessible, poorly made or just plain bad.
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. It is the seventh year of the exhibition and what is striking is the professionalism of both the work and its installation. 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: 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. 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. In the best work, there is a confidence in the relation of concept to physical form.
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. 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: RIP The Sims Online 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: 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.
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. It is anticipated that the refurbished space will reopen towards the end of During the closure period, selected works from the collections will be shown at various venues.
Domenico Ghirlandaio and his workshop between 9 For Perugino, see Scarpellini The the drawings for the Entombment painted unfavourable estimation was primarily due to for the burial chapel of the Baglione family in their poor condition: Irregular shaped, extremely thin paper out. In general, it is a conservative market looking for fresh work and top-quality examples: Works by Corin Sworn b. We discovered during our research that there were five conscientious.
The exhibition will highlight the breadth of the collection of Scottish art, from Aberdeen-born. Several examples from the outstanding collection of portraiture will be shown, including Miss Janet Shairp by Allan Ramsay —84 , who is considered to be the premier Scottish portrait painter of the midth century. In , the collections were enriched by a bequest from John Hyslop of his fine paintings by the Scottish Colourists. 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.
More recent acquisitions by such Scottish artists as Calum Innes b. 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. Aberdeen Art Gallery will visit Cookham, where all the Stanley Spencer works will be shown for the entire closure period. 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.
Upstairs, the floor is lined with small bronze trees, on the branches of which will eventually hang some of the cubes currently being fired. Clayton, who put tongue-in-cheek signs listing the house rules around the building. Depending on where you see it, war is going to be pertinent to the collective psychology of that country at that time.
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. He then marked each drawing with Indian ink according to his perceptions of the spaces in his mouth. Added to the mix for the Biennale are musicians from the Scottish Ensemble and composer Sally Beamish. 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.
He is grateful to begin a show with experience rather than from a completely blank slate. Tuesday to Sunday 10am—6pm. Graham Fagen 3 Production image, L-R: Holger Mohaupt 4 Production image, L-R: Indian ink and enamel on paper. 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. They are a wonderful organisation that has been touring contemporary art around Scotland since the s, 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. 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.
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. Elsewhere in the exhibition digital technologies are used to re-frame older, existing works or to bring back to life lost sites. Visitors can play the game as well as view sketches, prototypes, artwork and a short film about the making of it. The technology allows for a virtual visualisation of sites, which in some cases, no longer exist.
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. 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. This collaborative approach is also what inspired the Design Scotland app. It works by allowing users to create a design map of Scotland through sharing their design stories, icons and photos. 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.
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, A landscape and still life painter, Duncan Shanks was born in in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, and studied at Glasgow School of Art in the late s and early s, 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.
The artist often states that drawing has always been an addiction and a 34 ART. He started filling sketchbooks in the s, making quickly drawn notes for himself. By the s, 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. 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.
In , the artist started to consider what to do with the sketchbooks piling up in his studio. Three different types of sketchbook can be identified. 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. In its accompanying publication, The Poetry of Place: Talking about his formation as a painter, he recalls: 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.
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. 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. Energy and movement are for me vital and unavoidable in celebrating the Scottish landscape. Tuesday to Saturday 10am—5pm and Sunday 11am—4pm The sketchbook collection can be viewed by appointment in The Hunterian print room. 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.
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. 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.
Artworks take varying forms: Museums Press has yet again provided a wonderful home for varied and exciting new work. 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. 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. With an astounding eight new booklets made towards the end of , Piper sums up my feelings on contemporary low-run art-zine making: Owen Piper will no doubt continue to produce some of my top publications of Good Press 5 St. Tuesday to Saturday 11am—6pm. A pilgrimage to the Biennale. Lure of the Lost is a contemporary pilgrimage that sees artist Anthony Schrag b. Starting in June, the pilgrimage will take three months and cover 2, kilometres.
It has been organised in conjunction with The Walking Institute, which explores the human pace through journey-based projects. Founded in 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.
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 to contextualise this exploration and to open it up to the general public. The Way to Venice, held at St. 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. Contact details and a route map can be found at deveron-arts. Fri 31 July, 10am c. The team captured the space using 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 — 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 and Mr Cruikshank The studio inventory lists 1, 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 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: Scottish Art News highlights new additions to permanent collections across Scotland and exciting acquisitions of Scottish art further afield.
The ambitious artwork founding directors of the Glasgow Sculpture Studios. It captures the city on the eve of the human form and landscape. 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. 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.
The works, part-funded by the Art Fund, represent the first public commission for GoMA since it opened in These works take the ancient Scottish folk legend of Finella as their subject. All three works — to William Doughty — 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: 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.
Lay died in June , 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 years, was recognised as a Wilkie by Scottish sculptor, painter and printmaker William by London-based art dealer Ben Elwes when he saw Turnbull — Two oils on canvas, Untitled it in the catalogue for a sale in New York.
Buy Edinburgh Sketchbook Read Books Reviews - www.farmersmarketmusic.com In comedian Kev F Sutherland and artist Heather Tweed paid their first visit to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. They have returned almost every year since.
The work was known to exist because it had bought by the gallery in through the Henry and featured in an oil sketch, Display of Eight Paintings, Sula Walton Fund, with assistance from the Art Fund. They were presented by members of the Ford 48 ART. 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 It Portrait Artist of the Year. Purchased in with the aid of a grant from the National Fund for Acquisitions. 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 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. 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, pieces, many of them Scottish. In the experience of some dealers and artists, the Scottish art market was suffering badly until mid, but in spite of the economic turnaround, the market for more traditional, mid-career Scottish artists remains a hard sell. High-end contemporary work is represented by Douglas Gordon b.
A rising name in the Glasgow contemporary scene, sculptor Sara Barker b. 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 as part of the Edinburgh Art Fair. More conventional blue-chip art also has pulling power: In general, it is a conservative market looking for fresh work and top-quality examples: After resigning from his post at the School of Art in , his sketching activity grew considerably: This was a direct outcome of his new, full-time commitment to painting and of the growing importance of the sketchbooks as visual diaries of his daily thoughts and of the perambulations which were taking him further from home.
Sequences of drawings, whether made in hours or days, started to appear. In his own words:. Ten or twenty drawings might be made in a session and I would often return, as the day developed, to rework earlier notes, hoping to intensify and strengthen their impact. The first became about taking his raw material to the next level or finding solutions for paintings in progress.
Among these are extracts from poetry and literature which convey the feelings and ideas with which he was currently working. They also document the development of a semi-abstract vocabulary inspired by places or objects with which Shanks was personally connected, or historical associations that made a particular landscape interesting to him.
Fragments of Memory is an assemblage largely inspired by sketchbook drawings and by 20 years of walking up Tinto hill. The first drawings specifically connected to Night Garden appear in sketchbooks dated —5 of the garden and the Clyde valley. The next stage of the creative process can be traced through four subsequent sketchbooks. A rare chance to see behind the scenes at the Hunterian Art Gallery.
At this special curator-led event, participants will see items from our Duncan Shanks collection that are not included in the exhibition. Please note, this event is now fully booked. Hunterian Insight Talk Duncan Shanks: Materials and Techniques Tuesday 24 March 1. Professor Paul Bishop from the University of Glasgow will talk about messages in the landscape in relation to Duncan Shanks. Hunterian Friends Curator's Insight: Duncan Shanks Monday 11 May 2. Centre for Open Studies Study Session: Duncan Shanks Wednesday 8 July Followed by a tour of the exhibition.
Booking details to follow. Camilla Athayde, and University of Glasgow work placement students Ana Szilagyi, Alyssa Hoff and Lesley Jennifer Neason, made valued contributions to the cataloguing and photography of the sketchbooks. It is a journey which does not readily reveal its destination.
Locations and the Act of Drawing. Knowing a landscape and its geography intimately through walking and drawing has let me concentrate immediately on that special moment which is different from anything that I have seen before. In his own words: Born, Airdrie, son of Duncan F. Shanks and Elizabeth Clark.
Post-graduate diploma and Travelling Scholarship to Italy. Part time lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. Saw the Bonnard retrospective exhibition, Royal Academy, London. Elected Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy.