Tim Cornwell's Diary: Giving a voice to the great chieftain o' the paintin' race

Published on Thursday 6 November 2008 22:19

SACRILEGE? Sacre bleu! It is the world's most cherished portrait of Robert Burns, and now it speaks.

Alexander Nasmyth's revered likeness of the bard, captured when he lived in Edinburgh in the 1780s, has graced a multitude of book covers and mousepads. It is a jewel of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery's collection.

But now a tasteful reproduction, a flat-screen digital painting with lips that speak and eyes that move, is hanging with the original in a new Burns show, Zig Zag, at the National Library of Scotland.

The gallery chief, James Holloway, signed off on the speaking portrait, which uses a cheap computer programme that can also make photos speak. But it will only speak two Burns poems and one of his letters – with no comic turns.

"It wasn't a talking head for the sake of it," says curator Kenneth Dunn. "It's his own stuff we are putting in his mouth."

We could see other talking heads at the portrait gallery before long, staff say, all in the name of bringing the collection alive.

A private engagement

PHOTOGRAPHER Ezra Mabengeza was treated to a Fringe-style nightmare this week when he arrived in Britain from New York but his photographs didn't. His baggage and 15 prints for his Edinburgh exhibition went missing on a Toronto stopover, but after two days of nail-biting at Heathrow he was riding north yesterday, by train.

Truth in Black and White, at the Warehouse, features photographs by Mabengeza that run from his family home in South Africa's Eastern Cape to Tuscany. They go on show for a week with paintings by his fellow South African, Jonathan Freemantle. The pair met at the Westbourne in London, a notorious artists' watering-hole, six years ago.

Like Barack Obama's election, Mabengeza says, the exhibition celebrates "common ground… We are really starting to look at each other as individuals and our commonality rather than what separates us."

Mabengeza, also an aspiring actor, was in Tuscany for the filming of Spike Lee's new movie, Miracle at St Anna, about black soldiers fighting in Italy in the Second World War.

"I'm playing a private," he says. "I'm one of the guys who survives." It's a minor role, however: the scenes where Mabengeza's character actually speaks ended up on the cutting room floor.

A wonderful Ching

PANDA diplomacy for Scotland was put on hold after this year's earthquake hit China's panda sanctuary and derailed the planned timetable for one of the fetching beasts to come to Edinburgh Zoo.

Stuffed panda diplomacy, however, has a new lease of life. Ching Ching, the panda that China gave to Britain with her partner Chia Chia in 1974, is to go on show in Edinburgh. She died cubless in 1985, but now she will stand resplendent in the National Museum of Scotland's Treasured exhibition. Opening on 14 November, Treasured: Wonderful Things, Amazing Stories features 300 classic exhibits from the collection, "from a Sumatran tiger to a Victorian corset".

Pooh makes a mint

IF YOU missed out on an original drawing of Winnie-the-Pooh by EH Shepard at Bonhams auctioneers this week (31,200, double its estimate) never fear: Sotheby's London is promising "the finest single collection" of Shepard's originals in December, topped by "He went on tracking, and Piglet ran after him" (est 40,000-60,000). A selection of AA Milne books are also under the hammer.