Contemporary Edinburgh Painters and the City as Subject

Edinburgh has been painted more continuously than any other city in Scotland, and the painters currently working in and from Edinburgh do so within a tradition that includes Henry Raeburn, David Wilkie, William McTaggart, Cadell's Ainslie Place interiors, and three full generations of postwar Edinburgh painters. The fact that the city has been painted for three hundred years has not exhausted the subject, and the contemporary Edinburgh painters find new material in the same buildings, streets, and light that previous generations worked with.

The New Town terraces, with their Georgian proportions and their specific gray stone, are the most painted subject in Edinburgh's contemporary practice. What the current generation does differently from their predecessors is a matter of attention rather than location. Paintings of Heriot Row or Great King Street from the 1980s tended toward architectural portrait, the full sweep of the terrace at a formal remove. Contemporary painters are more likely to crop into a single window surround, a doorway, or the relationship between two adjacent buildings, and the painting becomes about the particular rather than the general.

The Old Town offers a different kind of subject, denser and more vertical, with light that reaches the ground only briefly in narrow closes. Painters working in the Old Town tend toward darker palettes, tighter framing, and closer attention to the way stone changes color with dampness, time of day, and season. The closes of the Royal Mile, the back windows of Fleshmarket Close, the gray-and-yellow stone combinations around St. Giles: these specific subjects accumulate in the contemporary Edinburgh painting catalog as the Old Town equivalent of the New Town terraces.

Portobello and the harbor provide the edge conditions of the city that contemporary painters use to escape the postcard Edinburgh. The beach at Portobello, the industrial remnants of Leith, the less-painted eastern approaches: all offer working-city subjects that the tourist-facing Edinburgh catalog rarely foregrounds. Painters who choose these subjects are positioning themselves within a tradition that includes the Glasgow Boys' commitment to working subjects and the Colourists' willingness to paint the everyday rather than the picturesque.

The weather in Edinburgh is a subject in its own right, and the contemporary painters are more willing than earlier generations to paint the full range of it rather than the days that photograph well. Fog off the Firth that reduces visibility to the next corner, persistent drizzle that makes every stone surface reflect the sky, winter afternoons when the sun drops below the Pentlands and the city turns blue for an hour: these subjects have been taken up by the current generation with an attention that produces paintings distinctly of Edinburgh. The city continues to offer new problems because its weather, light, and stone continue to be specific in ways that reward the discipline of looking.