Cathy's Art Diary

Nice exhibition at the National Gallery of Scotland to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir David Young Cameron who is best known as a print maker and was part of the etchings revival of the late 19th century. I loved his very detailed pictures of architecture such as one of the Five Sisters’ Window in York Minster which gave a wonderful sense of the shape and effect of the window. Similarly I liked one of Winchester Cathedral with great arches of light formed by the dark architectures around them. The commentary said he was a deeply religious man who believed that beauty and decoration were essential to worship. I was interested to see how he’d be influenced by Rembrandt, having visited the Rembrandt House recently, and that he had given 56 Rembrandt prints to the gallery which he had collected. He sat on the Board of Trustees of the gallery and there was a lovely print of the building itself by him in a cabinet in the middle of the room. In fact he had been beh...

Small exhibition at the National Gallery of Scotland of 19th century landscapes from this private collection which are on long term loan to the gallery focusing on Norwegian and Swiss artists. These were rather lovely small pictures of dramatic views with interesting commentaries which pointed out the links between the artists. I loved Thomas Fearnley’s “Fishing at Derwent Water” with a dramatic linear composition of rocks in the foreground, a row of reeds, the water then mountains in the background and with a fisherman at the centre. Also a wonderful study of rocks by Alexander Calamer where the rocks and the water running over them were the same colour but he managed to give a sense of the different feel and texture. Closes on 20 January 2016.

Interesting exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery bringing together new children’s book illustrators with established artists in the field for a year’s mentoring. The show hung examples of the work that the new illustrator had done during the year and work by their mentors plus interviews about what they had both got out of the relationship.   I loved the work of new comer Hannah Coulson who had done pictures to illustrate Italian folk tales including a lovely picture of a geese herder with the geese as silhouettes against the girl’s long coat. I also loved a picture by her mentors Mick Manning and Brita Granstrom for a book on the Beatles. I liked Catherine Lindlow’s pictures for a book on a child and their relationship with food. Who could resist “The Joy of Spaghetti Hoops” for the title alone! Also some stunning pictures by Tracey Smith of collage style pictures of houses against a dark background but I couldn’t work out what project they were for. Close...

A lovely idea for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh which brings together more than 30 prints, watercolours or drawings picked by warders of the Gallery from the Prints and Drawings Collection. Each picture had a write up about who had picked it and why. It gave a different view of the collection and a real insight into the people who worked there. You got a glimpse of a community including a large number of men who had been made redundant from industry in the late 1990’s but had now found a new life. A Van Heemskerk was a nice link to the exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery. My favourite was probably predictably a sleeping dog by David Octavious Hill!

Two painting exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh bringing together Rubens “The Feast of Herod” with Ribera’s “Drunken Silenus”. In the mid-seventeenth century the two paintings were the highlights of the huge collection amassed by Gaspare Roomer, a wealthy Flemish merchant and financier resident in Naples. A nice opportunity to see these two pictures together and muse on what the original owner’s eye saw in them.