Glasgow
mark.hudson
If you'd been a painter at the time of Impressionism, what would you have done? Rushed to Paris to become a disciple of Manet or Monet? Taken the Symbolist route with Odilon Redon or headed to Brittany to whoop it up with Gauguin and co? No, the chances are you'd probably have got it wrong and, like the so-called Glasgow Boys, hitched your talents to a now virtually forgotten figure like Jules Bastien-Lepage. Jules who? Exactly.A loose group of some 20 painters, the Glasgow Boys worked at a time when Scotland’s industrial capital, the second city of the Empire, was asserting its cultural Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Let's face it, the rom-com has an image problem. Too often, this genre is tainted by either sugar-sweet sentimentality or crashing cliché, or both. Often, there’s something more than a little oppressive about the whole idea of romance, as if love’s natural idealism is too weak to withstand a cold dose of reality. But there are exceptions. And this show is one of them. It’s great to be able to welcome D C Jackson’s new play, which he calls a “non-rom-com”, and which arrives in London having first enjoyed a successful outing at the Edinburgh Festival in August.We start off in the land of the Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Far more than gay men, lesbians are one of the great invisible minorities of British TV drama – British TV generally, in fact. Sure, there have been the milestone moments – the Brookside kiss that titillated the nation back in 1994 and was the making of the then 18-year-old Anna Friel, or Jeanette Winterson’s terrific 1989 adaptation of her own novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Both featured lesbianism as an issue or a problem rather than a well-adjusted sexual orientation.More recent dramas have set the Sapphism in the past, with the likes of Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet or The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The American networks have so far been able to resist the stick-insectish charms of David Tennant, but the BBC would probably start up a new channel just for him if he asked them. In this new four-parter, his comeback appearance after handing over the keys of the TARDIS to Matt Smith, Tennant plays Dave Tyler, a successful Glasgow photographer married to teaching assistant Rita (Laura Fraser). They have a ramblingly large house full of kids and a dog, and live one of those exuberantly chaotic lives that only exist in TV drama, where domestic duties and hectic leisure activities magically co- Read more ...
sue.steward
To Futureproof is to ensure that we don’t become technologically obsolete, but keep in touch with as yet undeveloped technologies and exploit those already in the ether. It’s an apt title for this exhibition of work by 16 graduates from the five Scottish university photography departments. That most are already future-proofing themselves is apparent in their diverse approaches to their work.But that leaves those who choose to walk backwards in time, away from the digital world and into the dark room, from phones, camera and pens, screens and keyboards to ancient image-recording methods and Read more ...
fisun.guner
During my two-day whistlestop tour of various galleries and arts venues across Glasgow, I’m afraid I didn’t spot one white bike. There are, apparently, 50 of them that punters are free to use for the two-week duration of the city’s second biennial International Festival of Visual Art. It’s a scheme that pays homage to the original Witte Fietsenplan (White Bike Plan) by radical Sixties Dutch movement Provos. Set up as a statement against consumerism, pollution and congestion, the action was predictably short-lived: most of the bikes were either stolen or trashed.But Glasgow is an optimistic Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Since winning the Turner Prize in 1996 with Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) has lived in Germany, France, New York and Germany again. But in accent and attitude, he remains a Glaswegian. Those roots are being reaffirmed at the moment: as part of this year's Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, one of Gordon's most celebrated works is back on display in the city where it was first shown.24 Hour Psycho plays the entirety of Hitchcock's classic on a pair of screens, but reduced to two frames a second. First mounted at the Tramway in 1993, the work Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Who's the greatest living British exponent of the late Romantic repertoire? Many would say Edinburgh-born conductor Donald Runnicles (b. 1954). Runnicles has spent the last 30 years quietly forging a formidable name for himself abroad, first, as a repetiteur in Mannheim, then as an assistant to Sir Georg Solti at Bayreuth, as guest conductor at the Vienna State Opera and, for the past two decades, musical director of San Francisco Opera. In 2007 the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra announced that Runnicles would return home to become their new chief conductor. This week he performs Strauss, Read more ...
David Nice
Two hundred costumes, over 60 solo roles and the world premiere of a great operatic composer's first thoughts: it's a task which would daunt the best-resourced opera company in the world. The fact that Prokofiev's initial, 11-scene meditation on Tolstoy's War and Peace was launched last night by students with slow-burn but ultimately total confidence, an orchestral collaboration with established professionals and a fusion of production with design at the very highest level could only send us out in to the streets of Glasgow echoing the Russian soldiers' final cries of "Ura!"The most Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Richard Wright's work celebrates impermanence but his election last night as the 2009 Turner Prize winner - an award which brings with it a purse of £25,000 - has guaranteed it a sort of immortality. The Glasgow-based painter's major piece currently on display at Tate Britain is an enormous, luxuriant and ornate symmetrical fresco painted in shimmering gold leaf which commands the otherwise virtually empty room it occupies. Wright's is the most traditional of the four shortlisted shows at the Tate Britain. Conceived in response to the parameters of each individual space (a video on view at Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Londoners, we know, can be spoilt. Certainly the crowd, predominantly of nerds in rare and expensive trainers, at the Lightbox last night didn't seem to be overly bubbling with enthusiasm despite an exciting lineup of talent and astonishing surroundings. The main dancefloor area of Lightbox lives up to the club's name, being an arched space with the entire wall/ceiling surface covered in colour-changing LED lights that allow pictures and patterns to dance across the room. But the nerds – and a very few women, mainly in equally modernist trainers – seemed almost oblivious to the fabulous Read more ...