FIVE FAVES FROM UNION'S LATEST

The Christmas exhibition, newly opened at Union Gallery on Broughton Street, features work by over a dozen contemporary artists: sculptors, painters and ceramicists at various stages in their careers from around Scotland and beyond. 

There is no single theme which unites the pieces on show, so here instead are some thumbnail responses to five of them, to which you are welcome to add your own thoughts on favourites between now and February.

Delightfully rain-splashed is the scene above, titled ‘Hanover Street’, by Henry Kondracki. It looks to me like Festival weather, and perfectly captures the sense of colourful excitement in the city at that time of year.  

It doesn’t feel as if the artist plans to stand still. That bus may take him south to the High Street. That slope may lead him north into Stockbridge. One way or another, some discovery awaits.

Who can fail to be amused and amazed by Barbara Franc’s creations, fashioned from recycled packaging? On one wall of the gallery is an eruption of toadstools and mushrooms, rendered with extraordinary detail but also a kind of shaped rhythm which conveys a life and resonance beyond any similarity to a particular ‘Shaggy Ink Cap’.

This one, in its ungainly black finery, reminded me of some Parisian lady, a fleeting drunk companion to Baudelaire or Lautrec. 

I liked Ruth Addinall’s ‘Bouquet and Moon’ for its unsettling, narcotic poppies and foxgloves, its gorgeous purple curtains. I liked the fact that the image is painted to look flat, but contradicts itself with the water’s glittering perspective towards a distant hill. There’s something mysterious and slightly dizzying about the work, possibly the result of seeing the Moon through window glass.

Joyce Gunn Cairn’s ‘Lost Love’is a painting which quietly teases with the interplay – to and fro – of possible readings.

It is a work of delicate creams and off-whites, pale greens and greys punctuated by the subject’s thin yellow hair, red lips and nails. She sits staring blankly at the viewer, or perhaps through the viewer, as if she has no more tears left, no energy to interact.

But who is the lost love? Scrawled onto the paint in pencil, almost too faint to read, is a German phrase, ‘Wenn es nur eine Frau gewesen wäre’: ‘If it had been just a woman’.

Are we to interpret this as the painter’s or the subject’s feeling? And is that ethereal, vanishingly transparent cat the sole or additional, real or remembered problem?

For such an apparently still painting, this study shimmers with questions.

Finally, I couldn't resist Vanessa Cabban's 'Urban Fox' – solemn-faced, full-brushed and aflame. He does your eyes good.  AM

The Christmas exhibition continues at the Union Gallery (45 Broughton Street) until 31 January.

------------------------------

Henry Kondracki's atmospheric 'Hanover Street' – one of many new pleasures at @UNIONgallery1 http://www.broughtonspurtle.org.uk/news/five-faves-unions-latest …

 Jason Clark Rather wonderful that.

  New Town Flâneur ‏@NewTownFlaneur  

@theSpurtle Very nice indeed, but looks suspiciously like Howe Street seen from Queen St Gdns West...

@NewTownFlaneur That is the transformative power of Art, you idiot, and the reason why Sister Wendy never appears with an A–Z in her fist.