New Year: New Blog

Well - it is the first week of a Brand New year! We decided to start the new year with a bracing walk up Arthur’s Seat on the 1st, not only to clear any heads but to take in a whole view of the city I love and to wonder what could be in store for 2024.

Although I don’t really subscribe to resolutions and refreshed ideas for living better each year, I do find it inescapable in part, especially seeing as though winter is a natural time to take stock and reflect. And so here I find myself quite literally reflected beneath the enormous Vulcan, Eduardo Paolozzi’s vast welded steel sculpture; half man, half machine striding across the café with tables nestled beneath.

I am enjoying the last days of freedom before the work schedule kicks back in, and somehow I have found myself enjoying two gallery visits in a week. Unheard of luxury! The first was to the National (Royal Scottish Academy) to take part in an Edinburgh institution, which, if you have never been, I can heartily recommend. Turner in January is a famed collection of his watercolours, bequeathed by Henry Vaughan in 1900. In accordance with his instructions, they are dusted off and put up each January, when the light is lowest, for people to enjoy for free.

The watercolours only take up one room, so if you’re not really overly bothered by atmospheric depictions of 1800s Venice, the Himalayas, the Swiss Alps and beyond, you can still whizz round, tick it off the January to do list and then grab lunch in the National’s restaurant.

The second visit (and where I am sitting writing this) is (of course) the Modern Two, and anyone familiar with Edinburgh’s art offerings will have guessed by way of the Paolozzi description. Where else can you have a coffee and an oversized jammy dodger underneath an oversized sculpture??

To get here I walked through Dean Cemetery in the afternoon drizzle, the only acceptable weather for a wander through a graveyard, especially one with such grand gravestones and monuments to the philosophers, artists and academics of the later Enlightenment. And squirrels. Lots of squirrels. If you don’t know, there is a gate in the back wall, right at the end of the main path, and you can go through it to reach the back of the Modern Two, and be further guided to the front door by the lit up sign declaring There Will Be No Miracles Here (Nathan Coley’s outdoor work).

I just managed to catch the last days of Decades – The Art of Change 1900-1980, which was a wonderful snapshot of each decade’s major art influences. I did spend a bit too long searching for the 80s (which might make a good book title?) before realising the 70s completed the exhibition. Hey, I’m here to make those mistakes so you don’t have to! It ends on 7th Jan.   

So if we’re not writing any resolutions (too easy to fail), not taking part in dry January (boring) or Veganuary (is that still a thing?), what are we doing? I feel like I have set some sort of intention here by making the effort to visit two art galleries – more culture for 24 perhaps? There is definitely some sort of peace of mind for me personally when surrounded by works of art. Maybe it’s a tangible part of the past and a common history. Or maybe there is an energy that encourages you to want to create, be creative or look at problems in different ways. Perhaps it is just the pretty colours.

Speaking of which, the sky has developed a painterly streak of glowing apricot and I think it’s time to make my way back home in the last of the light. I intend to set the fire and allow all the pieces I’ve just seen dance through my head in tandem with the flickering flames. Here’s to art, colour and warmth.

Let’s see what 2024 brings!