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Scottish Portrait Awards 2024

Scottish Arts Club, Edinburgh 

Four stars

 

All life is here in this year’s Scottish Portrait Awards, first launched by the Scottish Arts Trust in 2017. Divided across two rooms of thirty fine art works and fifty photography pieces, every face contained within the show tells a story, whether looking directly out from the frame or else turned away, a reluctant subject. 

 

The familiarity of public figures in some images is an obvious appeal. Studies of Michael Rosen in Daniel Fooks’ painting, and novelist James Kelman in Chris Close’s photograph are both broodingly chiselled and well deserved winners in their respective categories. More playful is The Strange Case of Billy’s Banjo, a painting of the late John Byrne in his studio, while Matt Brown’s photo of Young Fathers shows a band who understand fully the value of image.

 

Beyond the famous, more intriguing everyday narratives come through many of the works on show. There is the monumental torpor of Frederick du Plessis’ Anhedonia, the eyes closed avoidance of That Time by David Herd, and the well practiced calm of Graeme Wilcox’s award winning D in Stripes. Margaret Ferguson’s Release is a moving photographic study of her dying father. The outdoor swimmer in repose in Jennifer Charlton’s A Hidden Community looks curious, Lucy Gordon looks birdlike in her self-portrait, The Perch, and a windswept serenity pervades the woman at one with nature in Hebridean Breeze.

 

This year’s awards looks to the future by way of the introduction of the Scotland Now! Phone Portrait Awards. This initiative features more than fifty shortlisted artists working in his quick fire form and shown digitally as befits their source.

 

While each work is disparate in approach and concerns, the entire exhibition makes up a collective portrait of a society asked to pause a moment. Together, they make up a rich tapestry of a world at large. 

 

Scottish Arts Club, Edinburgh until 28th September; Duff House, Banff, 4th October- 31st January 2025; Charles Rennie Macintosh Gallery, Glasgow Art Club, 8th-27th February 2025.


The List, October 2024

 

 

 

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