Exhibitions
Fionna Carlisle (369 Gallery till 31 August) John Bellany (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art till 21 September) Bruce McLean (Scottish Gallery till 3 September)
Hot Scots
Giles Auty
The day I travelled to Edinburgh last week chanced to be the anniversary of my father's death. On the train I passed happy hours remembering his many oddities. One morning my mother surprised him carrying breakfast off into a large cupboard where the rest of the family kept wellingtons. He was not quite sure why he was doing this.
My own favourite breakfast-time recol- lections involve the unlikely nature of conversational topics introduced by my father. One such was to engage a girl I had invited to stay in the pros and cons of pronouncing 'quandary' with a long second 'a'. I think the word was not in her vocabulary in the first place. The embar- rassments of life with my father fell unpre- dictably and indiscriminately. It is a pity his dislike of the supposed inconvenience of travel meant that he never visited Edin- burgh, the one place where he might have felt thoroughly at home.
My own affection for the city is not simply because it bristles with regular Spectator readers — although this is strong- ly in its favour, of course — but because of the combination of eccentricity and intelli- gence which distinguishes many of its inhabitants. What other city could or would claim Richard Demarco, whom I last saw imperturbably leading a distin- guished Polish delegation through the cob- webbed upper reaches of a semi-converted church? This is to become Richard's latest and most grandiose gallery. His real life continues to make unlikely fiction and he therefore stands at the furthest remove from the humourless art bureaucrat of whom, by contrast, there are far too many. At this time last year, the no less remarkable 369 Gallery complex — a converted department store in Cowgate — was still in similarly incomplete condition. Today it provides excellent exhibition spaces where visitors may see, among other events, the lively creations of some of Scotland's hot young artists. One of these, Fionna Carlisle, is currently showing large, colourful figure paintings in which potent young women seem to be enduring, rather than enjoying, the strenuous atten- tions of rather swarthy-looking men. I understand the artist has recently moved to Greece.
While enjoying this exhibition I encoun- tered the distinguished Scottish painter, musician and glider pilot, Alan Davie, for the first time in years. Very sensibly he resides in St Lucia for much of the year and I suspect his presence in Edinburgh may be taken as a compliment to some of his juniors; certainly he was generous in his praise for the huge exhibition of works by John Bellany at the Scottish National_ Gallery of Modern Art in Belford Road. This is, indeed, a magnificent exhibition from a middle-generation painter and one which provides merited reward for the artist's rare honesty of purpose and com- mitment. Those who visit it would be lucky to see anything of comparable stature by 'I've got a crush on you.' an artist still in his or her mid-forties during the foreseeable future. Bellany served his apprenticeship as a student amid the empty artistic posturings of the early 1960s but was lucky enough to attend Edinburgh, rather than one of those many art colleges in which life classes, that essential basis of humanistic painting, were already being closed or threatened.
Bellany's imagery, drawn largely from childhood in a Scottish east-coast fishing village, will be familiar to many by now. His symbolism is sometimes erudite but never lacking in discernible and necessary meaning; in this he differs from some of his younger Scottish counterparts who are seeking too easy a career as professional Scotsmen. Young Scotland cannot yet claim exclusive rights to iconoclasm and irony and could find itself in danger of self-parody.
Unfortunately I missed Bruce McLean's performance piece and so must confine comment to his paintings and ceramics at the Scottish Gallery in George Street. I did not much enjoy his work in the infamous New Spirit in Painting but admit to liking his present crop very much better. Their content seems to have much in common with Billy Connolly's anarchic and scatolo- gical humour, but now tempered by a growing elegance. How much this elegance is intended I cannot guess, but am confi- dent it has nothing to do with mellowing or growing effete.
Among the many visual attractions of the Festival, Lighting up the Landscape at the National Gallery of Scotland is one no visitor should miss. Its subject is that happy but too little regarded era immediately preceding Impressionism when the likes of Corot, Courbet, Daubigny, Boudin and Theodore Rousseau were at their dis- arming best. The exhibition is superbly mounted and catalogued, as also is Printed Light, an exhibition of emergent photogra- phy at the Scottish National Portrait Gal- lery and Painting in Scotland: The Golden Age at the Talbot Rice Art Centre at the university. A painting in the latter, the portrait by David Wilkie of William Chalmers-Behune contains a visage so forceful and extraordinary as to make one question its veracity had one not already just seen a face every bit as remarkable in Bellany's wonderful 'Portrait of Jonathan' of 1966-67. It is in this way that the major traditions of Scottish painting are being ostensibly continued and preserved.
In conclusion, one should also salute an ambitious exhibition at Edinburgh College of Art which aims to introduce a group of younger Scottish artists in the process of their work. These artists will also receive visitors to their studios on selected dates in the interests of frank and natural dialogue.
With Edinburgh's unnervingly elastic licensing laws, I feel many exchanges may move on rapidly to more genuinely suitable venues for artistic discussions of an un- inhibited nature.
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