Apindra Swain’s artwork, one of five Covid-inspired pieces from India acquired by Glasgow Museums. Pic: Glasgow Museums IT has become THE phrase of the pandemic, two little words that sum up the last year in a nutshell - Stay Home. An artwork which spells it out with human figures is one of five acquired by Glasgow Museums, which is collecting material to record the Covid-19 pandemic for future generations. Apindra Swain’s piece joins work by Kalyan Joshi, Rajesh Chaitya Vangad, Bahadur Chitrakar and Heera Devi, in the city’s World Cultures collection. Unique to Scotland, the collection is a combination of works on cloth and on paper. Each showcases a distinct style of traditional folk and tribal craft from a different region of India.
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.