Kirkcudbright Galleries

Now on at the Tolbooth. Well worth a look.

This week Timmy Mallett visited Kirkcudbright Galleries, as part of his mission to find the location of a bridge his dad painted in the 1960s. Over the past couple of months we helped discover the location of the bridge for Timmy, so he could recreate the painting. As a thank you Timmy gifted Arts Officer, Rachael Dilley with an original watercolour of the bridge. Thanks for visiting the gallery Timmy. We are thrilled your mission was a success 😊 @ Kirkcudbright Galleries

Just 27 tickets left for the Scotland’s Early Silver Lecture on Thursday 13th September 2018. Follow this link to reserve your tickets: https://www.kirkcudbrightgalleries.org.uk /…/scotlands-earl…/

If you are interested in exhibiting at the Kirkcudbright Tolbooth or Castle Douglas art gallery in 2019 get in touch with The Stewartry Museum or Tolbooth Art Centre they are taking booking forms.

@ Kirkcudbright Galleries Mezzanine: 7pm - 8pm
FREE ENTRY. PLEASE RESERVE TICKETS VIA THE FOLLOWING LINK: https://www.kirkcudbrightgalleries.org.uk /…/scotlands-earl…/
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This is looking really good folks!

Stars of Scotland Artists Biog: Joan Eardley, 'Street Kids', on loan from the National Galleries of Scotland, National Gallery of Modern Art.
Joan Eardley was an artist noted for her portraiture of street children in Glasgow and for her landscapes of the fishing village of Catterline and surroundings on the North-East coast of Scotland. One of Scotland's most enduring popular artists, her career was cut short by breast cancer. Her artistic career had three distinct phases. Th...e first was from 1940 when she enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art through to 1949 when she had a successful exhibition of paintings created while travelling in Italy. From 1950 to 1957, Eardley's work focused on the city of Glasgow and in particular the slum area of Townhead. In the late 1950s, while still living in Glasgow, she spent much time in Catterline before moving there permanently in 1961. During the last years of her life, seascapes and landscapes painted in and around Catterline dominated her output.
Eardley's work was already highly acclaimed by many in Britain by the time of her death. Since then she has been recognised as an artist of international importance, although not universally. A retrospective exhibition held in Edinburgh in 1988 was hosted by the Talbot Rice Gallery and the Royal Scottish Academy, the then director of the National Galleries of Scotland having declined the opportunity to mark the 25th anniversary of her death. A National Galleries of Scotland retrospective was finally held in 2007-8. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has many of her works, as do the Glasgow Museums, which hold both coastal landscapes such as Catterline Coastal Cottages (c. 1952) and figurative paintings such as Two Children from 1963.
According to Dr Janet McKenzie of the National Galleries of Scotland, Eardley's untimely death 'meant that she was never given the stature she deserved. Her work deserves to be compared to Frank Auerbach, David Bomberg, Lucian Freud.' For Guy Peploe, 'There was a desperate urgency to her work. It was almost as if she knew that she was not going to be the grand lady of Scottish art.' Murdo Macdonald says of Eardley's Catterline seascapes: '[S]he committed herself to understanding the sea more than any other painter since William McTaggart in the 1890s. Rather than just responding to the attraction of the coastline, she painted with the perception of a mariner aware that waves are heavy, fast moving lumps of water, as able to kill as to support. In this she reinvigorated a maritime trend in Scottish art...' One of her biographers, Cordelia Oliver, observed that, 'for her a truly successful painting had to go deeper than a mere visual record, no matter how accurate... [H]er success lay in her ability to combine the acute, uncompromising painter's eye with a warm human sympathy and understanding'
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Stars of Scotland, Artist's Biog: Pablo Picasso, 'Les Soles', on loan from the National Galleries of Scotland, National Gallery of Modern Art (sorry, due to copyright requirements the work cannot be reproduced - you'll have to come and see it for real!)
Pablo Picasso is probably the most important figure of 20th century, in terms of art, and art movements that occurred over this period. Before the age of 50, the Spanish born artist had become the most well known name in moder...n art, with the most distinct style and eye for artistic creation. There had been no other artists, prior to Picasso, who had such an impact on the art world, or had a mass following of fans and critics alike, as he did.
Pablo Picasso was born in Spain in 1881, and was raised there before going on to spend most of his adult life working as an artist in France. Throughout the long course of his career, he created more than 20,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics and other items such as costumes and theater sets. He is universally renowned as one of the most influential and celebrated artists of the twentieth century.
Picasso's ability to produce works in an astonishing range of styles made him well respected during his own lifetime. After his death in 1973 his value as an artist and inspiration to other artists has only grown. He is without a doubt destined to permanently etch himself into the fabric of humanity as one of the greatest artists of all time.
As an artist and an innovator, he is responsible for co-founding the entire Cubist movement alongside Georges Braque. Cubism was an avant-garde art movement that changed forever the face of European painting and sculpture while simultaneously affecting contemporary architecture, music and literature. Subjects and objects in Cubism are broken up into pieces and re-arranged in an abstract form. During the period from approximately 1910-1920 when Picasso and Braque were laying the foundation for Cubism in France, it's effects were so far-reaching as to inspire offshoots like the styles of Futurism, Dada, and Constructivism in other countries.
When Picasso died at age 91 in April 1973, he had become one of the most famous and successful artist throughout history. He is also undeniably the most prolific genius in the history of art. His career spanned over a 78 year period, in which he created: 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints and engravings, and 34,000 illustrations. Picasso was, and still is, seen as a magician by writers and critics, a metaphor that captures both the sense of an artist who is able to transform everything around him at a touch and a man who can also transform himself, elude us, fascinate and mesmerise us.
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Some more royal visitors to Kirkcudbright Galleries.

Stars of Scotland exhibition at Kirkcudbright Galleries until 23rd September 2018. 17 galleries from all across Scotland have lent a total of 40 works to Kirkcudbright Galleries. From Picasso and Millais, McTaggart and Eardley this exhibition is a celebration of the collections held by galleries all over the country. To view these works in their home towns you would need to travel to Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth and more. But today you can view all of these gems in one place - our place. Don't miss this stunning exhibition.
Entry fee £4 (£5 for unlimited visits) Free for under 18s, Friends of Kirkcudbright Galleries and Art Fund Members.

Stars of Scotland exhibition at Kirkcudbright Galleries until 23rd September 2018. 17 galleries from all across Scotland have lent a total of 40 works to Kirkcudbright Galleries. From Picasso and Millais, McTaggart and Eardley this exhibition is a celebration of the collections held by galleries all over the country. To view these works in their home towns you would need to travel to Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth and more. But today you can view all of these gems in one place - our place. Don't miss this stunning exhibition.
Entry fee £4 (£5 for unlimited visits) Free for under 18s, Friends of Kirkcudbright Galleries and Art Fund Members.

Stars of Scotland, Artist's Biog: William McTaggart (1835–1910), Halfway Home, on loan from the National Galleries of Scotland.
William McTaggart is one of Scotland’s most popular and celebrated landscape painters, who created powerful and enduring images of Scotland. The artist was born at Aros in Kintyre in 1835 and his upbringing in this rural setting would remain with him for the rest of his life. At twelve years old McTaggart was apprenticed to the Glasgow apothecary Dr ...John Buchanan, an important figure in his early career who recognised and encouraged the boy’s artistic talent. Buchanan introduced McTaggart to Glasgow artist Daniel Macnee, who suggested McTaggart seek a formal art education.
As a passionate and driven young man, McTaggart moved to Edinburgh at the age of sixteen, much against his father’s wishes. He entered the Trustees Academy in Edinburgh in 1852, and studied under Robert Scott Lauder, who taught him to draw and paint ‘in the round’ from antique casts and life models. In A Life Study of a Seated Nude Male Model, 1850s, he explores the gradations of light that would later characterise his Scottish landscapes. At the Trustees Academy he won various awards including first prizes for both painting from life and from the antique. Even as a student he developed a career in portraiture and Pre-Raphaelite genre painting, travelling to England and Ireland to complete commissions. During this time McTaggart became a regular exhibitor at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) in Edinburgh and the Royal Academy in London. The young artist achieved early success in 1859 when he was made an associate member of the RSA aged just twenty-four; eleven years later he became a full member.
cTaggart remained loyal to his Scottish heritage throughout his career; in the early 1860s, when so many of his fellow pupils at the Trustees Academy had departed to London, he refused to follow their example. McTaggart’s friend, the architect and writer T. S. Robertson asked him whether or not he had thought of joining them, but received the answer, ‘No, I would rather be first in my own country than second in any other.’
From the 1880s McTaggart painted the majority of his largest canvases out of doors. His broad, expressive handling of paint and en plein air technique has often been likened to his European contemporaries, the French Impressionists. However, it is now thought that the flickering highlights, varied brushstrokes and palette knife textures of the landscape painter John Constable had a more profound and lasting influence on McTaggart’s practice. McTaggart continued to paint up until his death in 1910, aged seventy-five and was buried in Newington Cemetery in Edinburgh. Many of his major works are now held in public art collections across the UK including Tate and The National Galleries of Scotland.
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Stars of Scotland - Artist's Biog: David Octavius Hill (1802–1870), View from the Bridge, on loan from the Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture
This 'View from the Bridge' is actually of the North Inch and part of Perth, with the River Tay and the distant Grampians.
David Octavius Hill was born in 1802 in Perth. His father, a bookseller and publisher, helped to re-establish Perth Academy and David was educated there as were his brothers. When his older brother Alexand...er joined the publishers Blackwood's in Edinburgh, Hill went there to study at the School of Design. He learned lithography and produced Sketches of Scenery in Perthshire which was published as an album of views. His landscape paintings were shown in the Institution for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland, and he was among the artists dissatisfied with the Institution who established a separate Scottish Academy in 1829 with the assistance of his close friend Henry Cockburn. A year later Hill took on unpaid secretarial duties. He sought commissions in book illustration, with four sketches being used to illustrate The Glasgow and Garnkirk Railway Prospectus in 1832, and went on to provide illustrations for editions of Walter Scott and Robert Burns.
In 1836 the Royal Scottish Academy began to pay him a salary as secretary, and with this security he married his fiancée Ann Macdonald the following year.
He continued to produce illustrations and to paint landscapes on commission. Hill was one of the earliest professional photographers, mastering this art after witnessing the Disruption Assembly in 1843 and recording the event with portrait photographs of the 450 ministers involved.
Along with Robert Anderson Hill went on to produce over 3000 images of local and Fife landscapes and urban scenes, the great and the good, and working folk. They produced several groundbreaking "action" photographs of soldiers and - perhaps their most famous photograph - two priests walking side by side.
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The Kirkcudbright Galleries Cafe, run by The Selkirk Arms Hotel, has been selected as a finalist in the Sports and Leisure Catering Awards for Innovation. Well done guys, only the best for our town! Results in September.

Excellent new space for the arts

Monarch of the Glen on Tour.

Smashing tearoom

Excellent new space for the arts

Monarch of the Glen on Tour.

Smashing tearoom

Excellent new space for the arts

Monarch of the Glen on Tour.

Smashing tearoom