A Trip to New Lanark

New Lanark. To someone who doesn't know about it, it's hardly a name to conjure with. Just another name signposted off the busy M74 linking Glasgow to Carlisle and the M6.

Not a bit of it, I knew it would be worth seeing. When I taught the contextual history of early photography, I used to show my students an engraving of New Lanark as it looked in 1816. We would then look at prints of industrial scenes of the mid-nineteenth century, sparking a lively discussion of the changes that took place in that extraordinary time. Changes that continue to resonate through the environmental issues we wrestle with today.

Edinburgh Art (3): Claire Barclay at the Fruitmarket Gallery

A visit to the Fruitmarket Gallery is worth making for the cafe alone, I was told. Award-winning coffee and irresistable home-made cakes. A great little bookshop too, specialising in hard-to-find art books and small-press books and zines. The Gallery's position nicely complements the City Art Centre, which is directly across the road in Market Street.

The current exhibition, running until 12th April, is by Scottish installation artist Claire Barclay. The piece in the photograph, which is called Subject to Habit, is fairly typical of her preoccupations. It mixes ready-made objects with specially designed, machine-made objects that seem oddly familiar but which defy absolute categorisation. For instance, the black gym mats in this piece trigger an association which determines how we read the other objects, which in turn are clearly not the objects our conditioned responses would lead us to think they should be. All the work in the show plays on the ambiguity of forms, carrying contradictory connotations such as malevolence and benevolence in an uneasy balance.

An informative video interview with the artist was looping in an upstairs room and the show was supported by a series of talks and a seminar. Edinburgh is indeed a lucky town.

Edinburgh Art (2): The City Art Centre

It's always a slightly frustrating pleasure to discover a great exhibition just before it closes. No time for a second look or sharing your discovery with friends. Visual Arts Scotland's 2009 Annual Open Exhibition at the City Art Centre was a luxurious warm wallow in the best contemporary art that Scotland has to offer. Sadly, this year's show closed after a six-week run on 19th March. Every 2 and 3-d medium (and style) seemed to be represented in more than 300 artworks displayed over two floors of this beautiful gallery.

I clearly wasn't the only one to fall in love with Kenneth Le Riche's large oil painting, The Conversation. This detail was used as the front cover design of the catalogue. To the left of this cropped image a shadowy male figure stands outside on a balcony, glimpsed through an open doorway. A well-deserved prizewinner.

Two floors down was the show that brought me here, drawn by my curiosity to see Bob Dylan's Drawn Blank series of paintings (also ended on 19th March). As the archetypical hero and spokesman of my generation as it grew into maturity, Dylan can still do no wrong. His 2006 album Modern Times is as hauntingly memorable as any of his earlier work. But with Dylan, there is always the hidden side where man and myth blur - and nothing is quite what it seems.


I have to say I quite like the work. Stylistically, it is fauve, with loose drawing and flat, vibrant colour. Echoes of Matisse or Dufy.The original drawings are said to have been made when Dylan was on the road and show a world in motion, of short stops and sidewalks, casual acquaintances and cafe tables. There is, in his subjects, none of the sensual intimacy of the original Fauves. Dylan's drawn line is much more fragmentary, angular and broken.

Key to interpreting the work, for me, is understanding that it is a composite of scanned drawings and painted modifications made more than a decade later. Like the mystery of the man himself, it is a subtle layering of reality and fiction.

Edinburgh Art (1): Calum Colvin at the Royal Scottish Academy

Natural Magic, on show until 5th April, is Calum Colvin's ideosyncratic tribute to Sir David Brewster, the eminent Victorian scientist/inventor whose researches into light and optics made an important contribution to the development of photography.

It's a fun, interactive show that needs you to press your nose against mirrors or look through coloured spectacles. An aesthetic Fun Factory for grownups. The catalogue is an elegant piece of affordable design, with a white-on-white cover and the handmade look of a brass screw post binding. As a bonus, there is a free stereoscopic viewer inserted in the back cover which is used to view the side-by-side stereoscopic illustrations.

London to Edinburgh by Train

The golden rule is always to sit on the right side of the train facing forwards, preferably in Coach B (the Quiet Coach). There you see most of what this wonderful journey has to offer as you speed through Northumberland and the Scottish Borders: Holy Island/Lindisfarne, the righthand sweep across the viaduct at Berwick-upon-Tweed and the wild romantic views of the North Sea, with its fishing boats and lonely ruins. To see all this and then to arrive at Waverley Station. Train journeys don't get any better than this!

Lindisfarne, seen from a train.