12 August 2015

Word of mouth is the happy fall back for exploring Edinburgh’s festivals, when thousands of shows shovel their star ratings at you in a noisy clamour for time and attention. So when a Scottish artist and retired teacher, asks what’s interesting in the Edinburgh Art Festival this year, we talk MC Escher and John Bellany – and I tell him to go see Audrey Grant’s show, at the Union Gallery in Broughton Street.

The exhibition is not actually in the festival. Established galleries in the city have to opt in financially to get a mention there and some have declined to do so. But that does not prevent them showcasing their top offerings. Grant, though just turned 50, is an artist to watch, and the word of mouth on her work is very good.

For customers of the Union Gallery, and of Painter and Hall, who now represent her in London, Audrey Grant is also an artist to buy. By opening night, of 18 paintings in the exhibition, all but three or four had sold. Her last exhibition at Panter and Hall has now entirely sold out; she will go back to Pall Mall, with a solo exhibition in the gallery’s larger upper space, and who knows if she’ll soon be lost to London entirely.

Introducing Grant’s exhibition two years ago, the critic Jan Patience wrote how she scratched her head for days to articulate how the works affected her; I did the same. The solitary figures she paints carry an immediate, accessible charm. These still waters run deep; scratch the surface, absorbing, grave, thought-provoking. They are from an artist in a later-life career, making a series of interesting shifts through different degrees of abstraction.

Sunday, 9 August 2015

If you have time to take in only one exhibition this summer, Audrey Grant’s at the Union Gallery is a strong contender for your attention.

Spurtle has covered Grant’s work several times before (see 4.3.13) , on each occasion admiring her humane but unflinching studies of the human form. She dwells upon its external and internal flaws, its dislocations and imbalances, finding in these imperfections a kind of vulnerable beauty, even nobility.

Such themes are in evidence again here, although this time often referenced through the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, whose lines are sometimes quoted in the paintings’ titles or scratched onto the surfaces of the works themselves.

Before going any further, let me urge you to get close to Grant’s work. Much of the pleasure it gives comes from the energy with which the paint has been applied – thick, delicious swirls and drips and daubs. This is textured in every sense.

Sunday, 12 July 2015

As its name suggests, Summer Cocktail comprises an invigorating blend of styles and strengths which leave one feeling slightly less in touch with the day-to-day world on the way out than one did on the way in.

This reviewer’s favourites included Lucy Jones’s ‘Blue Bear Café’: a familiar Canonmills scene here fragmented, refracted and reassembled as collage, monoprint and wax.

For all its apparent disjointedness, there is a solidity about its blues and blacks and central door recess which is particularly satisfying.

Drummond Mayo’s ‘Meditation’ is similar, at first glance, although here the viewer must settle for an effect which is far less resolved. That familiar point one often reaches with Mayo’s works, when a step back and a refocusing of the eyes reveals some hidden image, eludes on this occasion.

Sunday, 21 June 2015

‘It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.’

So wrote the US author and counterculturalist Hunter S. Thompson, and it’s a sentiment seemingly shared by several of the artists in this month’s joint exhibition Coast to Coast in the Union Gallery.

One of my favourite works was Mark Nicholas Edward’s otherworldly and unsettling ‘Rosacea’ – rendered with great realism but also a sense of almost sacred drama. Maybe it’s all those blues that do it, or the radiant solemnity, or the viewer’s position below the bells and hoods and at lightning level.

Imogen Alabaster also revels in the rich strangeness of underwater life and perception. In the work below, a seahorse rides the bubbling tumult, its life oddly reinterpreted in the painting’s title: ‘Tell her I’ll be waiting in all the usual places’. The wit of a well-chosen song lyric, the touching ridiculousness of a fish finding himself a slave to love, is typical of Alabaster’s style. Hers is a very nicely judged balance of colour, motion and incongruity.