KATE Downie’s paintings capture the dynamism and movement of modern life. Susan Mansfield learns how a year of pandemic confinement inspired her to look in a completely new direction,
THROUGH most of the last year, we’ve all been forced to focus on the homes in which we live. How do we really feel about these places? Might art help us re-imagine them? Artist Robbie Bushe, shortlisted for the prestigious John Moores Prize, talks to Susan Mansfield about his work
AS the sun sets on a winter afternoon, Huntly is a place of deserted streets and closed-down shopfronts. A once prosperous market town in the agricultural heartland between Aberdeen and Elgin, Huntly (population 4400, average household income £23,000) now tells the sad story of many small towns: economic decline, the slow withdrawal of services.
IT was in November 2020 that Nichola Fletcher decided it was all over. After five years of trying to raise money to save for the nation the remarkable home of craftsman and sculptor Tim Stead, the last funding application had been rejected. She and her colleagues on the Tim Stead Trust had reached the end of the line.
IN his obituary of W Gordon Smith in The Scotsman in 1996, writer and historian Trevor Royle spoke of “the great Scottish tradition of polymaths who not only delighted in their country’s cultural life but also made a substantial contribution to it”.
AS the drive curves through mature woodland, the house comes into view: a turreted Scots baronial fantasy in red sandstone. In taking the road to Hospitalfield, I am following in the footsteps of many of Scotland’s finest artists of the past 100 years.
WHEN Helen Bellany first saw her future husband, he was sitting at a piano, draped in a fishing net, thundering out “crazy jazz”. It was Fresher’s Week in 1961 at Edinburgh College of Art. Helen was 18 and newly arrived from Golspie. John Bellany was in the year above, a talented painter with a reputation for being “wild, outrageous and slightly crazy”.
EDINBURGH had never seen the like. The letters page of the Scotsman was aflame with polite indignation. In 1931, the capital was not ready for the paintings of Edvard Munch.
IN 1981, in an exhibition called Seven Poets at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre, Alexander Moffat’s seminal painting, Poets’ Pub, was exhibited for the first time. The painting, which was later bought for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, shows the key players of the Scottish literary renaissance clustered in a Rose Street hostelry.
