Heads will roll as golf club sculpture entrepreneur brings welding skills to the fore in the capital

It MAY not be art, but they like it. American Jeff Diamond is showing his works made from golf clubs at the Henderson Gallery in Edinburgh this month, and is also planning a trip to St Andrews.

About ten years ago Diamond, who was making lampstands from old law books at the time, had a brainwave. On a trip to Mexico City, he saw a sphere made of metal stars welded together and thought: “I can do that …with golf clubs.” The results are on show in Henderson’s, in the gallery space attached to the celebrated vegetarian restaurant: decorative shields with crossed clubs, hanging globes, umbrella stands and table lamps, all made from recycled clubs, mostly their heads. They would look perfect adorning any golf club or Scots-baronial home.

Diamond is one of those American entrepreneurs who knew a good idea when he saw one. “I can conservatively place 5,000 clubs a month making my products,” he says.

A single one of his big spheres, 34 inches in diameter, can use 500 clubs. His table lamps are on sale here for £195, and he’s sold 300 of those this year alone, he reckons.

Diamond’s works may never make it to the Tate, though his works are probably more original than Damien Hirst’s spot or spin paintings. They are part of a somewhat eccentric collection of work showing at Henderson’s, including some by Purvis Young, an African-American artist from Miami, described as a self-taught “urban expressionist”, who died recently.

For the next several months, the Henderson’s space is being run by a British couple, Colin Fleming and Ruth Harris, as the Collectible Art Gallery. Fleming, a Scot who moved to the US in 1985, says his art collection, shipped here in several containers, includes about 3,000 pieces. The work on the walls this week ranged from Young’s primitive work to 19th-century watercolours, a pretty bizarre mix.

People move to Florida to retire and play golf, Diamond says, and when a golfing man dies, their clubs are the first thing their widows take to the second-hand shop, ensuring a ready supply of material.

He now employs two welders. His most popular pieces are small spheres made from the heads of persimmon wood drivers, which are becoming increasingly rare.

With metal drivers, he bakes on vibrant primary colours, then splatters them with a different coloured paint.

He’s about to inaugurate a new line of golf club furniture, using the welded metal shafts.

“It’s a green product,” he says. “It’s a clever way to use a club that would normally be thrown away.”

Diamond is no art school graduate. “Of course I have my degree in psychology,” he says. “It’s a little factory of art work, and I walk the line between manufacturing and art. I qualify as an emerging artist, and as a manufacturer.”

Royal appointment

The Queen is not seeing The Queen. While Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has been based at the Palace of Holyroodhouse for a week, handing out OBEs and opening the Scottish Parliament and suchlike, there are no plans for any royal visit to The Queen: Art and Image, just up the road at The Mound.

There must be a limited attraction to staring at oneself in some 60 portraits, both respectful and irreverent, on display. But the National Galleries of Scotland are promising a Queen lookalike at their “Right Royal Knees-up”, a free celebration of the show, on 16 July. The Queen’s limner, or official painter in Scotland, Dame Elizabeth Blackadder, has a major show in the upstairs rooms.

Architect in oils

A PORTRAIT of James Gillespie Graham – the Dunblane-born architect who designed Moray Place in Edinburgh’s New Town, and the Highland Tolbooth Church at the top of the Royal Mile (now the Hub, and the headquarters of the Edinburgh International Festival) – goes under the hammer in a London auction house today.

The painting, by Sir Henry Raeburn, is being sold at MacDougall’s, estimated at £12-18,000. It is part of their sale of the “collection of an American gentleman” – an unnamed US collector. It has been in the US for at least 60 years, it appears, after it was last sold there in 1951.

Though the picture looks from reproductions like a high-quality Raeburn, it is not the only portrait of the architect. Ardblair Castle’s collection includes a strong, full-length portrait by Sir John Watson Gordon, with a face similar to the Raeburn work.

Elizabeth Davie, originally from Skye, called The Diary about the painting’s sale after she came across it during research on Gillespie in Birkenhead, where he designed city streets. She fervently believes someone in Edinburgh should buy it and return it to the capital.

Graham, who lived from 1776-1855, is shown in a dark green coat and a white neckerchief, resting his elbow on what could be a book of his designs. He designed a number of other notable buildings, including St Mary’s RC Cathedral in Edinburgh and St Andrew’s RC Cathedral in Glasgow.

Neuk to the future

The East Neuk Festival drew capacity audiences for 75 per cent of its shows this weekend in its seventh and most successful year, and volunteers helped create a giant starfish on Elie beach.

Chairman Donald McDonald and artistic director Svend Brown yesterday announced a new fundraising drive, Take Us to Ten, to raise an endowment fund over the next three years to carry the festival forward. Brown called it a “rich, intense, thoughtful and deeply valuable cultural event”.

In a measure of the festival’s prestige, four concerts from the event will be broadcast on Radio 3’s lunchtime concert slots in August.