I am very much looking forward to my talk at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh soon- looking at apsects of Patrick Elliot’s show on British realism in the inter-war years.
It’s been a while since I was last at the gallery and the talk also provides an opportunity to look again at material that I haven’t considered for a while. It’s been nearly fifteen years since I started work on the monographic catalogue and exhibition of the Montrose painter Edward Baird and I am looking again at one of his better known paintings. At the opposite end of the scale is Fortunino Matania and his atmospheric, elegant images of middle class leisure. Matania is perhaps best known in Southport, near to Liverpool, where his posters sell well as tourist souvenirs.
Gerald Brockhurst, who has had quite a spike in profile with the exhbition’s poster, and the edge-of-the-surreal Tristram Hillier, make up the quarter of artists that I have decided to talk about. Want to find out more? See you there!
The lecture begins at 1245 on Monday 2 October in the Hawthornden Lecture Theatre, NGS, Edinburgh- free and no booking required. The exhibition “True to Life: British Realist Painting in the 1920s and 1930s” is on at Modern Two and runs until the 29th October.
Jon Blackwood 