A Visit to Paradise

A cold and damp day was left behind in order to visit paradise, located for now at The Queen's Gallery at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. It's an exhibition called: Painting Paradise; the art of the garden. It's a beautiful show incorporating not just paintings but also ceramics, botanical drawings and even beautifully embroidered chairs. I loved the audio tour the gallery provides for visitors. It was very informative and also had lovely music to accompany the exhibits. The catalogue too is gorgeous although I recommend buying it after visiting the show. It's a very hefty tome and you don't want to carry it around while looking at the exhibition.

At the entrance to the gallery there are two facing doors, featuring the lion and the unicorn respectively, symbols of the United Kingdom, the lion being the one for England and the unicorn for Scotland. The unicorn is accompanied by a view of Arthur's Seat in Holyrood Park while the lion features Edinburgh Castle and the skyline of Edinburgh.

The show will continue till the 26th February so plenty of time for a visit. I then treated myself to a cup of tea and a scone in the coffee shop next door before walking back to the car park nearby in the streaming rain.

It was good to get out of the house, that feels so very empty at the moment.

Inspiring Impressionism

The need to seek solace from the real world is still with me and today I lost myself in the beautiful paintings of Daubigny, Monet and Van Gogh shown in the Inspiring Impressionism exhibition held at the Scottish National Gallery on The Mound, Edinburgh. I loved the flower display outside. You can only see one pillar on the picture but all of them were decorating in the same way, using the colours of the French flag and also the Dutch one, so covering all artists shown.

As soon as I bought the catalogue it came to me that I had already seen the painting shown on the cover and once I looked it up I realized it comes from The Mesdag Collection, part of what I knew in my youth as Panorama Mesdag, an amazing museum in The Hague where I went quite a few times with my maternal grandmother (oma). She lived in Leiden and it was a standard part of my visits to her, to go to The Hague and see the panorama.

I remember going through a small door, climbing up many steps and at the top seeing a 360 degrees view of the beach in Scheveningen, painted by the painter Hendrik Willem Mesdag who was a member of the Haagse School (The Hague School).  He was not just a painter himself but also an impressive art collector.   The collection has a lot of sea and beach scenes and one of them is the painting shown on the catalogue, by Daubigny called Sunset near Villerville c. 1876. Seeing it made the memories come flooding back (and brought a few tears to my eyes).

Apparently The Mesdag Collection is now part of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam where this exhibition will be shown later in the autumn after the show in Edinburgh. The exhibition here is on till 2nd October and I will no doubt pay a return visit later on once I have read the catalogue.

It was good to see how busy the galleries were, not too busy for viewing the pictures but with a lovely buzz of people admiring the work.

A Surreal World

I'm far from sure that the message on the façade of the Modern One gallery in Edinburgh (Everything is going to be alright)  is true today. On this very unreal feeling day I went to see the Surreal Encounters exhibition held there (highly recommended, and open till September 11). I could never have imagined that I would engage in a conversation with a complete stranger about how grateful we were to be childless so that neither he nor I would have to worry about any future generations on a day when this country I love, made the biggest mistake of it's life.

Personally, as a migrant,  I felt the decision to leave the European Union as a slap in the face, but my heart bleeds specially for friends who moved to various European countries as well as for those Europeans who moved to the UK but retained their own nationalities. They face an uncertain future. But then so do we all.

Art is always my salvation in difficult times and I take strength from the words of Andre Breton (a leading Surrealist):"Let us not mince words. The marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful. In fact, only the marvellous is beautiful".  We can still enjoy beauty as much as we could yesterday.

I will grab some paint and make art, read a good book and have a (European) glass of wine. Life goes on, even though it will not be as we knew it.

Gallery One view

 

I'm not often in Gallery One of the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (most special shows are in Two) but was there today to see the small Bridget Riley exhibition and revisit some Picasso paintings, as well as work by Braque, Mondriaan and Delauney among others. It was so quiet after MoMA despite the quality of the paintings on display. This gallery deserves more visitors.

Unfortunately I and lots of other traffic, was snarled up with a pretty bad accident on the Edinburgh City Bypass on my way to the gallery which delayed me for more than 45 minutes, and had to reward myself with both tea and cake sitting in the sunny garden of Gallery One's cafe before throwing myself into Edinburgh city centre traffic to go home again! This is the view from Gallery One onto Charles Jencks landscape art

 

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Modern Scottish Women Exhibition

I am trying to visit as many exhibitions as I can and specially at this time of year when you never know when the weather might start to prevent such visits. So on a dark and dismal day I decided on the spur of the moment this morning to go to the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh to look at the Modern Scottish Women; painters & sculptors 1885 -1965 exhibition.

I am in general not in favour of exhibitions determined not by the art itself but by the gender of the artists concerned (why do we have specially exhibitions, for instance, of work by male quilters?!) but in the case of these women artists it is perhaps forgiveable that they finally get their own show Many of them had a pretty tough time of it, not helped by the fact that they very often had to make a choice between getting married or having a full-time job teaching art, because married women weren't allowed to have a full-time job teaching. This ludicrous rule (which needless to say didn't apply to men!) was only relaxed in 1945 and then probably only because there would otherwise not have been any art teachers and lecturers left while men went to war.

Although many of the artists in the show did exhibit during their life time, most of their work has been lingering in obscurity since their death. I was familiar with some of the names such as Phoebe Anna Traquair, Margaret Macdonald MacIntosh and Jessie M King, mostly because they are also very well known textile artists apart from their painting, and also Anne Redpath and Joan Eardley, who are more modern Scottish painters that have been exhibited frequently locally. Most of the other names were entirely unknown to me and I'm so happy to have made their acquaintance. All the artists in the show have a connection with Scotland in that they were either born there, spend time there during their lifetime or taught in Scotland.

The time period in the exhibition covers a number of new art movements, and that was clearly reflected in the work.There is a beautiful catalogue, covering each and every painting and sculpture exhibited and it also has a potted biography of all the artists. I'm going to enjoy reading more about each one in depth. The show is on till 26th June 2016

Hopefully this won't be the last we will see of their art.

 

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Head to Head

 

Met up with a friend today and after a very fruitful visit to the Apple store we made our way to the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh and admired the Head to Head exhibition that consists of sculptures of heads through the centuries.

I was rather taken with the surreal nature of this one.

After that we had an enjoyable lunch and got our own heads together in anticipation of our visit to NY. The rest of the day was spend setting up my new iPhone.

 

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Scottish Quilt Championships 2015

 

I spend a very pleasant afternoon at the Scottish Quilt Championships. The last show of the year and the fact that this show is local, held at Ingliston near Edinburgh Airport, always makes this event special.

The venue is not great for photography and I will be returning here with separate posts about each quilt, but I wanted to capture them with their rozettes today. The one above is called La Linea d'oro (The Golden Line) and consists of all the 12 Journal Quilts I made last year for the Contemporary Quilt Group. It won the 2nd prize in the Small Wallhangings section and well as the prize for Embellisment.

How the Light Gets in was exhibited in the Large Wallhangings section and received a Judges Merit and a red rozette. It was also hanging in a great position. Both came home with me at the end of the show as did the 3 rozettes. Now autumn and winter can begin when more quilts will be made for next year's exhibitions and these two will be in line for some more outings too.

 

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Back in Edinburgh

After not having been anywhere for a few weeks I'm now at the other extreme of having daily outings and I have finally managed to catch up with all the things I wanted to see on my list. The weather was not with me today though. I was driving to the bus stop (yes, that's how far we are from public transport) when it started to rain and I wasn't at all dressed for the wet. Thank goodness for small brollies that fit in a handbag. By the time the bus reached Edinburgh you couldn't call it rain any longer. It was more like a huge deluge.

But the minute I entered the gallery where the above exhibition is being held, I was engulfed in bright colours and beautiful art. The work was all inspired by Sheila's photographs taken during visits to the North of Scotland and the Islands as well as Iceland and Alaska hence the title North.

As you can tell it's on till this coming Saturday and I highly recommend a visit.

I had completely forgotten to take either camera to Edinburgh,  but in the end it didn't matter as it was way too wet to take pictures so instead I photographed a chrysanthemum from a bouquet at home. Once I started posting the picture here I realized just how perfectly it tones in with Sheila's poster. Love such synchronicity.

Light and Shadows

 

Another day brought another outing, this time to Edinburgh. I was fairly determined to catch the Jean-Etienne Liotard exhibition at the National Galleries on The Mound. It finishes this coming weekend and I'm pleased to have caught it in time. The pictures are amazingly detailed and that meant that the costumes the portrayed people were wearing could be seen in all their wonderful details

As you can see it was a beautiful sunny day and the figures on top of the Gallery stood out beautifully.

I resisted the temptation of the big wheel and instead wandered through Princes Street Gardens where I admired the lovely shadows seen below.

 

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A Visit to the Dovecot Studios

This summer didn't turn out as expected in any way. It has been a very sad time and that was also reflected in the weather. Apparently it has been the coldest summer here in Scotland since records began (whenever that was!). Certainly that's true for the period we have lived here. At the start back in June I made a list of everything I wanted to do over the summer months. Of all those activities just the ones with deadlines set in stone have been met but only one other thing has thus far been crossed off and that is the Escher exhibition to which I took my mother. Things couldn't continue like this and I decided to just get on with it. So glad I did as the two exhibitions I visited today were very much worthwhile.

They were both in the same venue (Dovecot Studios) and complimented each other beautifully. Both artists concentrated on working with abstract colour and texture. The first four pictures show the work of Kwang Young Chun, a  Korean artist. This is his first solo exhibition in Scotland (called Aggregations) and is harking back to ancient traditions with his triangular forms wrapped in Korean mulberry paper and tied with hand-twisted paper string.

 Part of the interest is that amazing script that in itself adds texture to his work. I loved the details.

Then I moved on to Bernat Klein's A Life in Colour show. I love this artist's work and have seen it before, specially his painting. This is a retrospective (he died last year) showing both textiles and paintings. Originally from Yugoslavia as it was called then, he spend most of his life in the Scottish Borders from where he provided luxury textiles to fashion houses all over Europe. All the pictures beneath are from his work.

 I love the extremely textural way he applies his paint.

Very often he used one of his own fabrics as a background for painting on such as the above parrot tulip painting.

His use of colour lifts the spirits and there are gems to be discovered in the details as well as in the overall pictures. Looking at the photographs I took you can see that's the details that attracted me most.

 It was very pleasant that photography was allowed as it would be hard to realize just how much texture his work has without getting so visually close.

It was also wonderful to see just how many of his works had red stickers on them. Had I the money I would have indulged too!

I had been planning to visit another show in Edinburgh but it was amazingly busy. In fact if you had lifted your feet the crowd would probably have carried you along so I decided to save that visit till the Edinburgh Festival is over. The Dovecot is one of the Festival's many venues. These two shows are still on till the 26th September and are entirely free. However I never escape from their shop without something and today it was a package of sunography squares to do sun printing with.  Will there still be a chance to do this before this summer is over, I wonder?

Visit to Escher exhibition.

 

 

My Dutch mother had never seen so many Escher (who was Dutch himself) drawings in one place, but the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh came up trumps!

 

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Back at The Secret Herb Garden

 

 

 

 

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The Secret Herb Garden

I met a friend for lunch in The Secret Herb Garden. This is a veritable plant paradise hiding on the south side of Edinburgh, not far from Ikea. You can easily imagine however that you are miles from anywhere. Inside the glass house there was a wealth of colours and as I had the camera with me I went to town with the photography. There was a riot of malva sylvestris (see above). I'm quite familiar with this one as my mother gave us some seeds.

 It was however the mauve poppies that stole the show for me. 

 Love the orange of these calendula.

 And here is a good view of just how wonderful the overall effect was, like an exquisite embroidery.

The lunch was excellent too and apart from plants there are many other tempting goods for sale. I was particularly taken with the herbal teas. The one I had with my lunch had calendula in it.