Alexander Moffat's Scotland's Voices, The Saltire Society, Edinburgh until September 30
www.saltiresociety.org.uk
AMONG all the many cultural happenings in the capital last month, a major new painting from one of Scotland's modern masters was quietly unveiled at The Saltire Society in Edinburgh. Scotland's Voices, by Alexander (Sandy) Moffat is intended to form a companion piece to his famous Poets' Pub painting from 1980.
Scotland's Voices celebrates and represents the oral tradition in Scottish culture, which fed into the work of all the poets represented in Poet's Pub. Set in 1959, it depicts and imagines singers, musicians, archivists and recorders, poets and thinkers committed to the folk tradition in its widest sense. Songwriter and man of letters, Hamish Henderson, who was a pivotal figure in the revival of the Scottish folk scene is at the centre and gathered around him are a clutch of figures: travellers Jeannie Robertson, Belle Stewart and Jimmy MacBeath, Border shepherd and crook-maker Willie Scott, singers Jean Redpath and Dolina MacLennan, Shetland fiddler Aly Bain and piper Allan MacDonald.
The painting by Moffat, a former Head of Painting and Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art, will remain on show at The Saltire Society until the end of September. Its next outing will be in January 2018 where it will be part of an exhibition at The Lillie Art Gallery in Milngavie called Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland.
Poet's Pub, which is in the collection of The National Galleries of Scotland, will be hung alongside Scotland's Voices for the first time in Milngavie. Also exhibiting with Moffat at the Lillie is Glasgow-born painter Ruth Nicol, who will be showing an epic series of landscapes associated with the poets featured in Poet's Pub.
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