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Festival Visual Art
MICHAEL CRAIK: RAZED TO THE GROUND
Modernist buildings and anti-illusionist abstraction 0.00
There can be an arresting intimacy in small paintings. The artist's relationship becomes that much closer and more private. the Intentions more modest. Certainly this seems to be part of the appeal of Michael Craik's most recent works. all of which are painted on slim aluminium protected slightly out from the wall. This gives them an obVious physicality. yet it must also prowde an ideal smooth support for Craik's slick. flattened colours to be applied. Though more abstract than representational, much like his preVious paintings, the influence of geometrical shapes found in modern architecture is pervaswe. In fact these works seem to represent modernist building facades as seen from a diagonal slant. resembling Hitchcock's NOrth by Northwest opening sequence. which also inSpired Scottish artist Martin Boyce.
These most recent paintings represent a further shift in Craik's working method towards anti-illusionistic abstraction, where the surface is not simply flattened. but protected; small geometric. tetris-like shapes protrude. though only slightly. from the surface in the most subtle form of relief imaginable. and only visible
when yOu catch the light
reflected on the Surface. Though almost single
colour fields save a few linear Structural lines. the co|0urs seem Synthetic but are indefinable: ‘Cold Front'. fOr example is baby blue With white linear Outlines; 'lnvaSion' is a richer. deeper maroon hue and a series of three; ‘Band Width‘. melds black and white With grey and creme. Craik cites Ellsworth KEN". as inspraton. ct.‘ his work 8 also reminiscent with a range of modernist artists who abandOned or pu‘ieo apart painting mid- stream. iRosie Lesso
I Amber Roome. 558 3352. until 30 Aug. Wed—Sat ‘1am—6pm free
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RICHARD LONG: WALKING AND MARKING Art created from the deepest. darkest mud 0000
Even at 60. Richard Long is a towering. physical man. He has trekked across the Sahara. Lapland. and the Himalayas. crossed Ireland in 12 days and lost himself in the Gobi desert and the Norwegian wilderness. For the past 40 years Long has been making journeys and documenting elemental interventions along the way - a line of trampled down grass. say. a cross of raised stones. or a circle of sand.
At times exhaustion and loneliness are implied. as in ‘Sleeping Place Mark‘. a flattened patch of grass in a daytime field. or in ‘Reflections in the Little Pigeon River: Great Smokey Mountains Tennessee‘. 1970. with Johnny Cash‘s lyrics to ‘I Walk the Line' overlaid. suggesting not only the place and era. but the inner soundtrack of song lyrics going around inside a lonely head.
Long has further emphasised the ’nature as medium' message with series' of drawings on paper, shown alongside gathered or drawn-on objects. Black paper is dipped in river Avon mud. the grey pouring down in visceral gravital drips. Then there are Moroccan tent pegs. children's Our'an writing boards and flattened. aged metal scraps from Agadir, all of which are covered in Long's rather self conscious, giant white thumb print patterns of circles and squares. The site specific ‘Throwing Muddy Water‘. is similarly staged. the Firth of Forth mud used to create this work splashed up the wall. Once dried out and cleaned up it seems sterile and ossified, much like the drawn-on objects, and it does seem hard to imagine these gallery works holding much gravitas without Long's backbone of land art to support them. (Rosie Lesso)
I Scott/sh Nat/o/ia/ Gal/mi. October. daily 7()(N77~~f3p/7§ ,~ i
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WILLIAM EGGLESTON: PORTRAITS 1 974 Colours burst and explode over groovin sublime portraits 00000
No matter what decade yOu were brought up in. the 1970s are absolutely dripping With glossy. honey-hued nostalgia. And it‘s exactly this kitschy, colour-saturated era that William Eggleston has captured in his 1974 photographs on show at Inverleith House. In this first showmg of these stunning large format colour photographs taken by Eggleston in his native Memphis over 30 years ago. but not printed until very recently. colours burst and pop at every turn — sunshine lf‘i'f: inn. (,rw gives way to gloss, the“, popsicle Vinyl. which IS happily sitting next to a powdery polyester disco blue. And viViri r so .' fOrmat photography that Eggleston use“. “worm. rirr each and every portrait.
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