Art

Gray’s is the smallest of Scotland’s four big art schools, and it’s a little smaller this year, thanks to an unusually low number of graduates in Fine Art (45 in total). Numbers promise to be back up again next year, but in the meantime it feels as if everyone has a little more room to breathe – both artists and audience. What’s lacking in quantity is made up for in quality, with a sense of resolved, mature work, of students who not only have interesting ideas but have put a lot of thought into how to explore and express them. And, in most cases, this is set out in a carefully written artist’s statement; would that the other art schools would follow suit.

One of the world’s most famous animal paintings, The Monarch Of The Glen, is going on display at The National Gallery in London for the first time in more than 160 years.

John Muir, the celebrated pioneer ecologist and instigator, in America, of the first of national park, was born in Dunbar. He left Scotland at the age of 11, but the love of nature that defined him was already well established and it is right and proper that he should be commemorated in his native land. The house in which he was born in Dunbar is more shrine than museum, but it sets out very accessibly the facts of his life and the ideas that drove him. The John Muir Country Park on the beautiful estuary of the East Lothian Tyne is a more practical memorial in the spirit of Muir himself. To that well-established project, however, there has recently also been added the John Muir Way, emulating the John Muir Trail in California. Running for 134 miles, coast to coast, the trail echoes Muir’s own journey from Dunbar to Helensburgh where he set sail for America with his family.

The investigation into the fire that engulfed the Glasgow School of Art will be “very complex” and “take some time” before questions over the future of the world-famous institution can be addressed, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service has said.

Assistant Chief Officer David McGown, director of prevention and protection at SFRS, said it will scrutinise “every aspect” of the fire, which he said had left the Glasgow city centre building “devastated”.

After undergoing a painstaking rebuild for the last four years, Glasgow’s School of Art has been left in ruin following a second devastating fire.

Glasgow School of Art has gone up in flames for the second time in four years, last night.

Plans to refurbish a museum containing one of Scotland’s most internationally significant collections of art have been boosted by a £1m donation from businessman Sir Angus Grossart.

It was a birthday party with a difference. Around 200 invited guests had gathered to view the restoration of one of Glasgow’s most celebrated architectural masterpieces on the 150th anniversary of its designer’s birth.

“St Kilda – you don’t exist. Your name is just a faint cry made by the birds that make their home on the high cliffs at the furthest edge of the United Kingdom, beyond the outermost of the Outer Hebrides.” So begins the memorable entry on St Kilda in Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands, subtitled “Fifty islands I have not visited and never will”. First published in German in 2009, replete with beautiful, retro-styled maps, the atlas was translated into English the following year and has been described as “gorgeous, lyrical and whimsical” by Time, and “utterly exquisite” by Robert MacFarlane. It even won Germany’s award for the Most Beautiful Book of the Year.

Ministers have been forced to step in to try to secure the future of one of Scotland’s most neglected architectural masterpieces after the demise of a company behind plans to turn it into a new cultural venue and visitor attraction.

In the Edinburgh College of Art Degree show this year, Ladina Clément has made an elaborate spoof of a dealer’s stand at an international art fair. There are red spots, business cards (blank), canvasses (blank and cast in plaster, one broken), a video of the balletic, white-gloved hands of an art handler. There is even a painting composed simply of red spots, but behind the stand the dealer lies collapsed either in exhaustion or despair. It is a nice satire of the corporate market forces that shape the art world and the dealers who service them. But in fact it is the curators working as a highly self-interested, professional cadre, quite as much as the dealers, who have led art down the primrose path of non-material, ideas-based art that it has taken in recent years.

Let’s face it, the visual art programme at Hidden Door is a superb excuse for a snoop around some fascinating buildings. But there is much more to it than that. The festival is acquiring a reputation for providing a platform for a mix of artists, some recent graduates, others well established, to show new work in interesting spaces and reach new audiences.

Given the sheer amount of walking involved in seeing Glasgow School of Art’s undergraduate degree show – a bumper one this year, with 139 students – Georgia Thornton’s idea is a very welcome one. She invites visitors to “Take a seat” (literally): strap your little wooden chair to your back like a rucksack, and, hey presto, you can have a rest whenever you need one. It’s also a timely reminder of the amount of work on show here – the acreage of hope, potential and creativity invested in two labyrinthine floors of GSA’s Tontine building on Trongate.

For more than half a century, it has lain out of sight in a Glasgow storage facility, but plans to restore one of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterpieces have received a welcome boost.

In searching for the story of her great-grandfather, Mary Horlock found a complex man whose brilliance at inventing camouflage was matched by his secretive nature

Last weekend there was a real spirit of celebration across the country, and it wasn’t just the royal nuptials.

Glasgow-born Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon is to join forces with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra to create a special tribute to the historic heart of his home city.

In the former ‘Kale Kirk’ on Barony Street, the Inglebys have found the perfect exhibition space