There’s more to Edinburgh arts than the Fringe
If you are heading to Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival this summer, don’t forget the Art Festival, a separate entity that provides an imaginative array of visual happenings in more than 50 familiar and unfamiliar locations. Most are not selling exhibitions, but several local commercial galleries do have interests in institutional shows that might increase the foot traffic to their doorsteps.
During the 1951 festival, a young, self-taught artist called Edwin G Lucas held an exhibition of his unusual, Surrealist-inspired paintings, which attracted no attention from the conservative art critics of the day. Lucas abandoned his dream of painting as a career, and his work was consigned to an attic. More than 60 years later, after he had died, this attic full of art was discovered by museum curator Patrick Elliott, who acquired some examples for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and a small but successful show was staged at The Fine Art Society in Edinburgh. Now, the Edinburgh Art Festival celebrates Lucas’s life work, with the artist’s first major institutional exhibition opening at the City Art Centre next week. Most of the works have been lent by Lucas’s family, and are not for sale, but about eight works, priced from £2,800 to £5,000 can be bought through The Fine Art Society.
Another local gallery with a stake in a museum show is The Scottish Gallery, which is mounting an exhibition of landscapes and interiors by Scottish painter Victoria Crowe, while the Scottish National Portrait Gallery pays tribute to the artist’s portraiture. Beyond Likeness is more than straightforward portraiture, but an investigation of personality in which Crowe reveals her interest in the workings of the mind – RD Laing, the psychiatrist, and
Dr Winifred Rushforth, the psychoanalyst, are among the sitters. As Crowe says: “Areas of philosophy, religion, psychological perspectives, poetry, music, art history, women’s roles and the inner life are important issues for me, and all have been nurtured by these people whom I have met through portraiture.” Crowe’s Scottish Gallery exhibition explores the effects of moonlight on nature – on snowy hillsides and the canals of Venice – with watercolours priced from £2,500 and paintings up to £30,000 each.