THROUGH most of the last year, we’ve all been forced to focus on the homes in which we live. How do we really feel about these places? Might art help us re-imagine them? Artist Robbie Bushe, shortlisted for the prestigious John Moores Prize, talks to Susan Mansfield about his work FOR most of this lockdown year, artist Robbie Bushe has been working on “Dwell”, his major solo exhibition currently online at Edinburgh’s Open Eye Gallery. In it, he paints all the places he has lived, from early childhood (he phoned family members for advice) to his current home in south-west Edinburgh. “It’s been something ridiculous like 29 houses in 57 years,” he smiles.
A CALL has been made for a dedicated fund to support artists and art organisations after a survey revealed the toll taken by the pandemic on Scotland’s creative community. It shows 65% of those working in visual arts suffered a loss of income for 2020, with 22% losing half or more of their expected income for the year. Over a quarter (28%) reported they were ineligible for adequate financial support having “fallen through the cracks”, thereby missing out on creative funds and government support packages. The impact has not just been financial, with 66% seeing a decline in their mental health since the pandemic hit.
The term “art critic” implies a negativity which by and large doesn’t exist in the writers who sally forth into the art world to create vivid pen portraits of the art they see and the artists they meet. Art critics tend to be art lovers. Not fighters. So it was with the late W Gordon Smith. Smith wrote about art for the likes of Visual Arts Scotland and Scotland on Sunday in an accessible and upbeat fashion from 1980 until his death in 1996. But writing was just one of the many strings Smith had to his creative bow. Author, poet, dramatist and photographer, he was also a prolific and pioneering filmmaker, who made more than 100 Scope and Spectrum arts documentaries for BBC Scotland from 1969 to 1980.