Self Portrait, from the Peploe exhibition.
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A virtual exhibition to mark the 150th anniversary of Scottish colourist Samuel Peploe’s birth has been launched in Fife – with thanks due to a famous local linen magnate.
ONFife, Fife’s Cultural Trust, say Peploe’s pieces – with their vibrant paintwork and luminous settings – provide the perfect pick-me-up for the dark days of winter and these travel-restricted times.
With 46 of the artist’s paintings, Kirkcaldy Art Gallery currently has the biggest group of Peploes outside National Galleries Scotland, thanks principally to the superb collection of Kirkcaldy linen manufacturer J W Blyth, the maternal grandfather of journalist and broadcaster Michael Portillo.
The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
PHILIP BRAHAM’S new exhibition is prompted, he says, by reflections on suicide.
In it, solitary trees stand out against poisonous skies, while stony paths wander into the centre of the composition and go nowhere.
The whole enterprise recalls the gloomy romanticism of the 19th-century German painter Caspar David Friedrich, whom Braham cites as a major influence.
Friedrich’s graveyards, ruined abbeys and visions of an icy wasteland fitted the bill when the Nazis required a new template for art to fill the galleries and to give the individual under totalitarianism the illusion that they had a soul.
The 20th century produced its fair share of brilliant artists in these isles, but there are few who so effectively capture the imagination as Joan Eardley, the Sussex-born expressionist painter of Glasgow children and north east land and seascapes who became one of Scotland s best-loved and influential artists despite her early death at the age of just 42. May 18 this year marks 100 years since she was born, and the Scottish Women in the Arts Research Network, led by curator Anne Dulau of the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, with other west coast institutions at its core from Glasgow School of Art to Paisley Museum and the Scottish Womens Library, have been planning the first major survey of her work in Glasgow for decades.
In August during Lockdown, the New Hall Art Collection held a Black Feminist Artists tour in collaboration with the Murray Edwards College MCR. In December, still in the depths of pandemic-induced indoorsness, I met with Harriet Loffler the Collection’s curator to discuss the importance of raising the profile of BME women artists in a world that has long ignored them, intentionally or otherwise. As Loffler pointed out, instances of white people leaving out the experiences of a whole group of people occur worryingly frequently.
“The vibrancy of the image is an anathema to the waxy portraits of long past white men that hang in the dining halls of many other Cambridge colleges”