An exhibition of paintings at the Stirling Smith

 

Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions at the Stirling Smith

 

 

Publishing Scotland: Eneas Mackay, Stirling
Saturday 1 December 2007 - Sunday 27 April 2008

An illustration of the People's Journal Office, StirlingThis exhibition is planned to coincide with the 500th anniversary of printing in Scotland by the press of Chepman and Myllar.

The exhibition will focus on the story of the press of Eneas Mackay, father and son, which operated in Stirling c1880-1950 and became the Stirling Observer Press.

The exhibition will give the opportunity to assess the output of this press and publishing house over a seventy year period. Eneas Mackay senior was also a publisher and seller of prints by Scottish artists. He published widely in the field of Scottish local and art history, as well as producing guide books and building up a travel and shipping agency business. A native of Inverness, he made an important contribution to the history of Gaelic publishing.

Both father and son were major publishers of Scottish poetry. It was said that copies of the firm’s books were to be found in the houses of Scots and Gaels the world over. Their contacts in the art world ensured the production of beautiful books which continue to give pleasure to collectors and bibliophiles today.

The exhibition will feature the Smith’s own collection, with that of private collector Stewart Campbell.

It will be accompanied by a series of weekly lectures and events exploring different aspects of the history of printing and publishing.

 

Please click to view a press release for the exhibition, as well as a promotional poster.

 

 

 

The Horse: New Paintings by Greer Ralston

Saturday 15 March - Sunday 18 May 2008

 

A painting by Greer Ralston.Greer Ralston, a graduate of Glasgow School of Art, has returned to painting equestrian-related work after 20 years of producing mainly figurative paintings. Greer regularly exhibits in galleries across the UK and has works in public and private collections including those of top world sportspeople and entrepreneurs.

A recipient of the international Greenshields Scholarship, she has also exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London and on several occasions has had portrait commissions auctioned off at Christie’s, London.

Horses have featured highly in the Ralston family over the generations and Greer herself competed from an early age. Her return to equestrian painting was inspired by the death of her late father’s Irish hunter.

Through her figurative work, she has donated many thousands of pounds to charity and her aim is to do the same through equestrian paintings, starting off with raising funds for the Riding for the Disabled at the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum.

 

 

 

Scottish Potters Association 2008 Open Exhibition
Out of the Fire
Saturday 3 May – Sunday 13 July 2008

An exhibition featuring work by 32 potters: Alice Buttress (Inverness), Alan Gaff (Argyll), Anne Morrison (Glasgow), Camilla Garrett Jones (Fife), Diana Mave Ferrari (Argyll), Dawn Newbigging (Berwickshire), Emma Pattullo (Aberdeenshire), Fran Marquis-Faulkes (Angus), George Young (Fife), Hannah McAndrew (Galloway), Harding & Palmer (Northumberland), Janet Adam (Edinburgh), Jane Barker (Aberdeenshire), Jeff Buttress (Inverness), Jane Kelly (Midlothian), Karen James (Glasgow), Kirsty O’Connor (Fife), Kenneth Tonge (Kincardineshire), Lyle Moar (Perthshire), Len Whatley (Perthshire), Maggie Longstaff (Midlothian), Miriam Reid (Lanarkshire), Neil Halley (Midlothian), Roger Bell (Cumbria), Ronna Elliott (Lanarkshire), Suzanne Davis (Perthshire), Sandra Halley (Midlothian), Susan Nuttgens (East Lothian), Stuart Orr (Glasgow), Vera Bohlen (Moray), Val Burns (Fife) and Veronica Newman (Nairn).

 

For more about the Scottish Potters Association 2008 Open Exhibition, please click here to visit the exhibition website.

 

More information about the Scottish Potters Association, their main website can be visited here.

 

 

 

Ten Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci

An Exhibition to Celebrate the 60th Birthday of HRH The Prince of Wales

Saturday 8 August - Sunday 2 November 2008

 

To celebrate the 60th birthday of HRH The Prince of Wales on 14 November 2008, ten of the Royal Collection’s finest drawings by the Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) will travel to museums and galleries across the United Kingdom in 2008-9. The exhibition will visit The Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum in Stirling from 8 August to 2 November 2008.

The Royal Collection contains the world’s most important group of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. These delicate works are preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle and are among the greatest treasures of the Collection. Although the drawings can never be on permanent display, because of the potential for damage from exposure to light, they are regularly lent to exhibitions around the world. This loan exhibition follows the success of three previous touring exhibitions of ten masterpieces from the Royal Library – held to celebrate the Millennium, The Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002 and Her Majesty’s 80th birthday in 2006 – which attracted record visitor numbers at venues across the UK.

Leonardo’s drawings are the richest, most wide-ranging, technically brilliant and endlessly fascinating of any artist, and this exhibition has been selected to demonstrate the extraordinary scope of his interests. It includes studies for painting, sculpture and architecture; a beautiful portrait of a young woman and a caricature of a grotesque old man; two exquisite studies of a dissected human skull and two of plants; a drawing of an arsenal, probably intended for a treatise on warfare; a highly accurate map of the river Arno, surveyed by Leonardo himself; a design for a dragon costume and an apocalyptic image of a deluge. The drawings demonstrate all the techniques and materials that Leonardo routinely used – metalpoint, pen and ink, brush and ink, watercolour, and red and black chalks.

Leonardo da Vinci was the archetypal ‘Renaissance man’, accomplished in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, anatomy, engineering, cartography, geology and botany. Yet beyond a handful of paintings, most of his great projects were never completed. His surviving drawings are therefore our main source of knowledge of his extraordinary achievements. According to Martin Clayton, Deputy Curator of the Print Room at Windsor Castle and author of several books about Leonardo, ’we can often grasp the true nature of Leonardo’s intentions only through his drawings’.

Through drawing Leonardo attempted to record and understand the world around him. The artist maintained that an image transmitted knowledge more accurately and concisely than any words, although some of his drawings are extensively annotated. Leonardo was left-handed, and throughout his life he habitually wrote his personal notes in mirror-image from right to left (although he wrote in the conventional manner when the text was intended for some other reader). This was not an attempt to keep his researches secret, as has been claimed, but probably a childhood trick that he never abandoned.