Merry weekend

My brain is fried after solid 12 hours of work over a new illustration commission (and that after all Saturday of another 12 hours of work over some other commission) so I am just puting up some nice images from a lovely weekend (from a week ago) we had in Haddington - there were friends visiting, Simon was playing beautiful clarinet and flute duets with his sister, children were little angels, conversations were vivid and funny, food delicious as usual. Enjoy! We certainly did.

Tomorrow a day of relaxation and intellectual stimuli - we have managed to book tickets for a meeting with Tracy Chevalier during Edinburgh Book Festival . A well deserved entertainment.

Disapointment

Stills put their new exhibition up couple of weeks ago. Not a very good one, unfortunately - again.

The text explaining the whole concept of the arteest idea is muddy and not very well written imho ('history has the ability to not only to reflect experience, but also to construct and create it through speculation' Hey, what eaxtly does it mean? Is it still history if it speculates? If it actually means anything or the curator was just to write a certain amount of words and had to fill in the gaps with something that sounds complicated enough to actually not to mean anything?), the whole idea of showing the opium trading lacks concept, pictures are made in this typical way where documentary photography is just badly exectuted so that it can pose as modern art instead. All in all a disappointing afternoon and what is worse we will be stuck with this exhibition for months on end as the funding is short and they keep therse shows for 3 to 4 months instead (and it is at least a third bad one in a row already!). Why the only proper photogallery in Edinburgh actually never shows any GOOD photography (there are so many good documentary photographers around who are not actually posing as artists who use photography as their medium?) while there is so many good projects around which actually never can get shown? People who, if they go to Calcutta to photograph an example of the opium trade, are going to come up with something more viasually and conceptually sophisticated than a b&w picture of a derelict house shot form two different points of view and shown without any explanation or introduction whatsoever. Unfortunately I know how this business works and it the artist was not living in NY but in for example Esbjerg, nobody would bat an eyelid to show his works in a nice, prestigeous gallery. So annoying and disappointing!

Or is it just a saying shown in practice that modern art = I could do that + yeah, but you did not.

Spain in Edinburgh

Two weeks ago (two weeks!) we went to visit an exhibition of Spanish and Spain inspired art in Scottish National Gallery. As usual there was a lot of uninteresting fillers among real gems (a beautiful portrait by Velasquez with these magnificent yet simple brush strokes and my favourite painting of El Greco that I used to stare at for hours when I was a child: Fabula, Around 1600, a Boy Lights a Candle, as a Monkey and a Bearded Figure Watch . I could not take my eyes away and was coming back again and again to annoyance of the rest of the family). There was as usual the whole bunch of Scottish artist inspired by Spanish sunshine while on vacations in the Med. The most spectacular discovery of the day was Arthur Melville and his big watercolours. I really liked his technique and colour choices and since I use watercolours more and more often in my own work I was studying him very carefully.

I am attaching some images of Melville's watercolours I have found on the web (I cannot remeber where, sorry!) - one with corrida was featured in the exhibition.

I have to find somewhere at my various stocks that fascinating book by Ortega y Gasset about Velasquez and Goya that I have read so many years ago!

Zeppelin above Grass Market

Window shopping part 2

A jewellery shop in George Street had these charming figurines in their windows:

I wanted to take couple of more photos as they had several of these characters on display but I was too affraid that somebody from the shop would suspect me of taking a picture of their alarm system!

Window shopping

I had to go into the dangerous area of Harvey Nichols yesterday (I cannot go there too often as my wallet and conscience suffer later on) and they had their spectacular shopping windows decorations up!

Down by the water - in Leith

I am having a strong sense of deja vu here - Krakow and Kazimierz, Edinburgh and Leith.

Leith has always been Edinburgh's port and until 1920 was a separate town. Stevenson was well acquainted with the area of Pilrig Street (I often go through there to pick up developped films from one of our favourite labs), often going to Leith Walk to sonsort with prostitutes. Irvine Welsh situates his characters in the area (wile referring to Edinburgh's Old and New Town as 'shortbread disneyland' and 'run by snobs for snobs').

At the moment Leith is quickly becoming a very fashionable part of Edinburgh - old workshops are converted into posh flats, the top advertising agencies have their headquaters there, old port brothels are being converted into boutique hotels. Although if you get a 16 bus down Leith Walk there are still really strange people getting on it and through the window one can see an array of dirty shopping windows (blame the tramworks), Polish delis and defence lawyers (mind you - they are always defence lawyers which have their offices in Leith).

We have been having a photoshoot near the old docks and after this busy working time we went to a nice fish restaurant just by the waterside. It was a pleasant but exhausting afternoon and we were happy to get up to our part of town.