First jigsaw – The Westbury White Horse

Posted on 9 November 2022 by Katrina

It’s that season again – jigsaw time. It’s of The Westbury White Horse, which is in Wiltshire. The painting is by Eric Ravilious and the jigsaw puzzle has 1,000 pieces. So far it hasn’t been too frustrating, but all of those green bits might get me down. I love the wee steam train chuffing away on the left hand side.

During World War 2 the artist Eric Ravilious was a war artist. Sadly he died on active service in 1942 when the aeroplane he was in disappeared over Iceland. I really like his style of painting.

A Taste for Impressionism, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

Posted on 30 September 2022 by Katrina

One day last week we went over to Edinburgh to visit A Taste for Impressionism Modern French Art from Millet to Matisse which is on at the National Gallery of Scotland. The exhibition is on till 13th November.

It was really busy, much busier than I had expected given that it’s late on in September, so hardly high tourist season. It’s a big exhibition with five large galleries full of paintings and sculpture. I must say that a lot of the artworks aren’t really what I think of as Impressionist art, but all the same there were quite a few that I wouldn’t mind hanging on my walls!

I liked the painting by Camille Pissaro below, not just because it’s a pretty scene but because it shows a bit of social history that I hadn’t heard of before – a mobile wash tub.

This is another Pissaro, Kitchen Garden at Hermitage Pontoise.

This one by Henri le Sidaner appealed to me.

You can see more of his work here.

Jean Charles Cazin, A Village Street at Evening – below, is very atmospheric. You just want to get into that wee house in the distance which has a welcoming light on.

If you click the link above you can see a couple of short films about the exhibition and some of the paintings.
You can have a look at Jack’s thoughts on the exhibition here.

Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh

Posted on 14 August 2022 by Katrina

A couple of weeks ago we celebrated our 46th wedding anniversary (I know, but I was a child bride!) and we couldn’t think of anything better to do than to spend the afternoon at Jupiter Artland, which is an outdour sculpture park by Edinburgh. It was a hot day, and we hadn’t had any rain for quite a while but as you can see the Charles Jencks landforms below are holding up quite well to the drought.

In the distance you can just see the three bridges which span the Firth of Forth in the photo below.

I must admit that I’m not that enamoured with some of the art on offer here but it’s a lovely place to walk around and when it got too hot we just headed for the surrounding woodland for the shade. I wasn’t too impressed with this ‘bomb’ below, but each to their own.

I didn’t really think much of the Tracey Emin sculpture below either, but Jack quite liked it. He took some of these photos.

You won’t be surprised to know that I was more impressed by the garden which surrounds what was the separate ballroom of the ‘big hoose’ where the owners of the Artland still live.

The ballroom houses some of the Tracey Emin paintings, you can see some here but the link is really better for showing the inside of the ballroom. The artwork is ‘parental advisory’, and Emin seems to have just one thing on her mind at the moment, these paintings are all very recent, done after her radical cancer surgery.

Below is the garden gate. I love the design of the grass intersected by paviors.

And through the gate you can see one of those lit up signs similar to the ones at Modern 1 and 2 in Edinburgh. I find those ones a bit depressing.

And below is the ballroom building which at the moment houses part of their Tracy Emin exhibition, we didn’t stay long, but as ever admired the interior decor.

The ceiling looks like an intricately iced wedding cake, upside-down.

I did quite like the very large metal structure below which is called Firmament. For some reason there are no information boards about the artworks but there was on the map we were given at the entrance. Firmament is by Antony Gormley. There are info boards in areas where art used to be located but has been moved on, telling what used to be there.

Way off in the distance we could see a tower and it turned out to be the rose walk below. It’s made of wood, I don’t know how well it’s going to weather Scottish winters, but it looks very elegant now. It would be a lovely place to get married I think. Oops, I’m in this one which Jack took.

All of the roses are white but you can’t really see them in the photos.

The heleniums below were enjoying the heat and sunshine. This path surrounds the pond.

We had a walk around the nature pond, if you look carefully you should be able to see the swans with their three cygnets.

Jupiter Artland is on the outskirts of Edinburgh and is close to the flightpath for the airport. Below I managed to capture an aeroplane on my phone, as it flew over the Jencks landform.

Then it was time for lunch at the cafe, which was very good. It was the perfect way to celebrate 46 years of annoying each other!

Barbara Hepworth at Modern Two in Edinburgh

Posted on 25 July 2022 by Katrina

We try to do something different at least one day every weekand last week we visited the Modern Two Gallery in Edinburgh to see the Barbara Hepworth exhibition . It’s on until the 2nd of October, we enjoyed it so much we might even go to see it again!

It’s all so tactile and huggable, but obviously you aren’t allowed to touch anything.

She also did traditional watercolours in her earlier years as you can see below.

As you can see from the photo below of her standing beside one of her works, some of it is absolutely enormous, monumental I suppose you might say.

Anyway, Jack was taking the photos on this visit and somehow missed some of my favourites, so I think we definitely will be making a return visit. I am just in awe of her as she managed to work at the same time as looking after her four small children. After she had one son, then she had triplets with her second husband, the artist Ben Nicholson, two girls and another boy!

Sadly she died in a fire at her studio in Cornwall. You can read about her life here.

The Queen’s Gallery, Holyrood, Edinburgh

Posted on 2 July 2022 by Katrina

Earlier in the week we visited Edinburgh so that we could go to the Masterpieces from Buckingham Palace Exhibition. The art on show had all been acquired by British monarchs and the information cards by each painting say which monarch had bought it.

You can have a virtual tour of the exhibition here.

Judith with the Head of Holofernes, painted by Cristofano Allori (1577-1621,) was bought by Charles I. I had to look up Holofernes and apparently he was Nebuchadnezzar’s general. When I saw that it was Charles I who bough this one I said to Jack that it was just as well he didn’t know what his own fate was going to be! Later that night I was watching a TV programme about Hampton Court and it was mentioned that it was partly Charles I’s habit of buying artworks that got him into trouble as the amount of money he was spending on them had made him very unpopular. I’m not surprised as a lot of the paintings in this exhibition were his.

The virtual tour is a bit difficult to navigate at first, but it’s worth persevering with it.

Aberlemno Pictish Stones, Angus, Scotland

Posted on 16 May 2022 by Katrina

When we were up in Aberdeenshire a few weeks ago we took the time to visit some of the standing stones in the area. Actually we drove into rural Angus from Aberdeenshire. The information board below is in Aberlemno. There is one large stone in the churchyard and some others on the edge of a nearby road.

As you can see one side of the stone is Christian. The stones date from around the 800s AD,

but the other side of it has been carved with men and horses, more usual Pictish symbols.

The stone below is the back of the one underneath it, the Roadside Cross.

There is a very faint design on the stone below but it has not fared so well as the others. I find it amazing that the rough weather of the north-east of Scotland hasn’t eroded them all completely though. Many of the headstones in the churchyard that are just a few hundred years old aren’t in the best of condition.

Reflections – John Henry Lorimer Exhibition – City Art Centre Edinburgh

Posted on 21 March 2022 by Katrina

Last Wednesday I realised that there was an art exhibition on at the Edinburgh City Art Centre featuring the work of John Henry Lorimer. He had a wonderful way with light and shadow, but prior to this exhibition I had only really seen his Spring Moonlight before which is probably the most famous painting at Kirkcaldy Art Gallery.

spring moonlight

You can read more about him and the talented Lorimer family here. If you’re interested that link has lots of links to click for more information.

Jack took quite a few photos at the exhibition and you can see them at his blogpost here.

Hill House, Helensburgh, Scotland, Scottish National Trust

Posted on 9 December 2021 by Katrina

One day six weeks ago or so we took the opportunity to travel across to my beloved west of Scotland, to the coastal town of Helensburgh to be precise. We were taking a friend of ours for her first ever visit to The Hill House at Helensburgh, it was designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. It was a wonderful commission for him and his wife Margaret Macdonald, as not only did he design the house for the publisher Walter Blackie but Margaret designed all the decor, art works and the soft furnishings, upholstery, bedcovers and such. Charles Rennie Mackintosh said that he had talent but that his wife Margaret Macdonald had genius. Below is one of her designs for a CRM chair. I must admit that I think those beads might be a bit uncomfortable if you lean back!

The artwork above the fireplace was also done by Margaret, annoyingly you can’t see it all that well in the photo below.

Below you can see some of the detail of the fireplace.

To the left of it is this built-in shelving unit. I’m not a big fan of the sugary pink, but he was keen on pinks, lilacs and purples as was Margaret.

I love the window seat which is in the same room. From previous visits I hadn’t remembered the small niche at either side of the seat, it’s the perfect size for parking your glass of wine, or cup of tea. It must have been a great place to sit and read.

The lamp below is in the same room, I think.

Sadly Hill House itself is in a bit of a poor state. I believe that the Portland cement which was used to harl/roughcast the walls has never been weatherproof, as CRM was assured by the builders, so dampness has always been a problem as you can imagine, in the damp weather of the west of Scotland.

So a huge metal framework has been erected over the whole building in an attempt to dry out the building while they come to a decision as to how to tackle the problem best. There is an advantage to this for the vistors as it’s possible to walk up a metal staircase which reaches right above the roof of the house, so you can get a really good close up view of the outside of the building, and you can get a great view of the Firth of Clyde, but it was a bit misty when we were there. I’ll leave Hill House for the moment but if you’re interested you can see better photos of an earlier visit here.

Auckland Castle’s Zurburan paintings

Posted on 25 January 2021 by Katrina

Around about this time last year we travelled to visit friends near Sunderland and one day we travelled to Bishop Auckland to have a look at Castle Auckland, mainly to see the Francisco de Zurburan paintings there – Jacob and his Twelve Sons. You can read about them and see some of them here. Religious art is really not usually my thing but these ones don’t have any of the nastiness that so much religious art has. This was our last trip before the first lockdown.

At the time I thought I had taken photographs of some of the paintings at least, but they somehow weren’t on my camera which is a shame. I particularly admired Zurburan’s ability to paint the details of the sumptuous fabrics that some of the sons wore.

Jack has done a few posts about our trip, he’s much more methodical than I am. If you’re interested you can see them here and here. (He tells me there is another one due tomorrow with a photo of Auckland Tower in its background which I’ll link to when it goes live. As it has now.)

Bookshelf Travelling – 6th December

Posted on 6 December 2020 by Katrina

Bookshelf Travelling is a meme which was originally hosted by Judith at Reader in the Wilderness, but at the moment I’m gathering together any other Bookshelf Travelling posts.

This week I’m featuring the bottom shelf of a Billy bookcase in my sunroom. This is a room at the back of our house looking on to the garden and it’s the main reason we bought this place. Anyway, it’s a shelf of art books this week. In normal times we visit a lot of art galleries, exhibitions and museums and of course that hasn’t been possible this year. As Friends of the National Galleries of Scotland we have been able to access some interesting talks by experts so that has been an unexpected plus anyway.

This shelf houses books on Renoir, Tissot, Matisse – mainly well known artists, so I’m just going to feature a few lesser known artists.

James McIntosh Patrick is very well known in Scotland, he was born in nearby Dundee in 1907 and died in 1998 and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. You can see images of some of his work here. Most of his paintings are of local rural scenes in the east of Scotland, I really like his work.

I love woodcuts and Four Hedges A Gardener’s Chronicle by Claire Leighton has 88 illustrations in it, as this is a gardening book it’s doubly of interest to me. You can see images of some of her work here. Clare Leighton was the sister of the poet Roland Leighton, Vera Brittain’s fiance who was killed in World War 1.

Introducing The Glasgow Boys was published by Glasgow museums and written by museum curators Jean Walsh and Hugh Stevenson. You can see some of the artists’ work here.

I love children’s illustrated books, not all of them of course but some are beautiful and frankly probably aren’t published for children to get their hands on, unless they’re being supervised! A Treasury of The Great Children’s Book Illustrators features works by Edward Lear, John Tenniel, Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, Beatrix Potter, Ernest H.Shepard, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen, Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and W.W. Denslow.

A Treasury of the Great Children's Book Illustrators cover

Other Bookshelf Travellers this week are:

A Son of the Rock
Bitter Tea and Mystery

Pining for the West

Meanderings about recipes, books, craft and more

Category Archives: Art