Many locals have a soft spot for Broughton Place.
There’s a satisfying confluence to it, an odd higgledy-piggledy, tumble-down descent leading to a pool of Georgian grandeur at the bottom.
Here, in Kirkwood’s 1819 Plan and Elevation, we see it in the years before completion, a rather charming guddle of homes, gardens, woodyards, and older structures gradually being subsumed under the New Town.
Similar contradictions are apparent in this atmospheric work by Edinburgh-based artist Henry Kondracki.
Kondracki has subtly stretched and compressed elements of the scene. And in doing so, he captures its human scale, its intimate ins and outs.
To this observer, it is the visual equivalent of a beating heart, simultaneously still and in motion. I find it captivating.—AM
‘New Town at Night’ is part of Union Gallery’s Christmas exhibition, which runs at 4 Drumsheugh Place until the end of next month.