Just a little art…

It’s difficult keeping up with a blog when you’re on the move and exposed to so much that is new. Anything I write tends to fall into the ‘and then… and then… and then…’ category and/or relies way too much on photos because they are a quick and easy way of telling a story. Often I just don’t know how to continue because so much has intervened in just the course of a day.

So, on our one full day in Edinburgh, after the riches of the Music Museum, the Dovecot Tapestry Studio and the Liberty Art Fashion and Fabrics exhibition, we ended our already overflowing day at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to see the Emile Nolde exhibition Colour is Light. And the colour was magnificent. I do struggle with Nolde’s interest in the grotesque (Otto Dix also comes to mind) but there was much to enjoy and be challenged by in these expressionist paintings.

I didn’t take photos – which mercifully are not welcome in the Scottish galleries. These are downloaded from the gallery website.

A further part-day in Edinburgh saw us at the National Gallery to view a Rembrandt exhibition as well as to look at parts of the regular collection. The aim of the exhibition was to showcase Rembrandts alongside “the many British artists he inspired, such as William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Henry Raeburn, David Wilkie, Jacob Epstein, John Bellany, and Frank Auerbach”. I would have preferred just the Rembrandts on their own, finding the others something of a distraction – though of course the exhibition did show just how much of an influence Rembrandt was on these artists. My love is always the portraits…