July 20th, 2010
Douglas MacBride is a professional photographer. He lives in Killin , West Perthshire. His work involves commissions for advertisements and commercial work, for promotions of all sorts.
But, between assignments, Douglas has quietly developed a hitherto hidden talent for spotting the obscure, the unlikely, the mysterious and the beautiful in the hills and valleys and glens around his home.
To Douglas, a puddle can transform itself , with a bubble on its surface, into a strange and interesting observant eye. Or a tree, the match of its neighbours, can detach and become a fierce ( or comforting, depending on the viewer) bird winging its way toward the camera.
“For years I have worked taking photographs as my job. Much of the work was purely functional, featuring items in shots for publication. Much of it involved portraying people, particularly in the theatre and the arts,” he said.
“Then, a few years ago, I had a double bereavement. My mother and father died unexpectedly and within a very short time of each other. I found it difficult to cope, and would wander by myself in the hills above Killin. Gradually I would be aware of forms and patterns in the grasses, the trees, the ponds, and how they differed, but to an extent remained the same in summer, in rain, in ice and in snow.”
“I decided to try to record these, getting beneath, behind and beyond the actual objects I was photographing.”
Some are sinister and sad, but reflect Douglas’ view of the continuity of things past, present and in the future. He calls the collection of almost sixty images “Archaeology” to reflect delving into things in places where they have been in one form or another for weeks or months or years or decades. Fallen trees, an animal track on the ice, long discarded antlers or a sheep’s skull, the reflection in a puddle – all are transformed through his lens into timeless images which bring the viewer to deeper thoughts on what till then were the ordinary things never seeming worthy of a second glance.
Douglas studied photography at Napier College. He was born in Shettleston in the east end of Glasgow in 1956 in the same house where his father and his grandfather were born. The family farmed there for generations before the area was taken over and built on with council housing by the former Glasgow Corporation. He has had exhibitions of his theatre work at the Edinburgh Festival in 2004 and a major show of his imaginative images in France last year sponsored by the French Ministry of Culture. In 1993 one of his works was voted the Best Illustrative Still Life in the World by the Art Editors Guild in New York. Several silver and bronze awards followed from the same prestigious body. His advertising work has been shown in New York, London, Perth in Australian and in Singapore.
Archaeology: The photography of Douglas MacBride will be on show, 11 am – 5 pm, Monday to Saturday until 28th August.
February 26th, 2010
A fugitive from the Nazis, Hilda Goldwag arrived in Scotland in March 1939. Her family were due to follow from Vienna six months later – on the day war was declared, September 3rd. They all died in the Holocaust – probably in Dachau in 1943.
Hilda eked out a meagre living, first as a domestic servant in a minister’s home in West Linton, then in an engineering works in Glasgow, until the end of the war. She then joined Friedlanders in Hillington, designing headscarves for Marks and Spencer – and using the artistic talent first spotted at an early age in her native city, and developed at art school there.
That talent got a chance to expand through necessity when Friedlanders lost its scarf contract, and closed down. Freelance design included book illustrations ( among them Collins edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses”) and she returned to painting, mainly in oils.
Much of Hilda Goldwag’s work inevitably and properly reflects the sadnesses which remained with her until her death two years ago a few months short of her ninety sixth birthday. And much of it shows her determination to get as much as she could from a life that she knew to hold so many uncertainties.
For years she was a familiar sight around Cowcaddens and Garnethill, where she lived for many years and then, with her supermarket trolley piled up with her painting materials, on the banks of the canal, near to her abode in Knightswood to which she had moved when the Great Storm of 1967 took the roof off her city centre tenement flat.
She escaped the city sometimes to Torrance and Kirkintilloch – taking her paints and board on the bus – and laying the wet finished, or almost finished artwork on the luggage rack.
A rare chance to see her dramatic paintings of people, of her beloved canal, of sombre moonlight and sad harlequins – and gloriously happy nudes portraying mirth, of wild young boys running and jumping, of trees and flowers and mountains and fields comes at Glasgow’s Hidden Lane Gallery, in Argyle Street, Finnieston (following the successful Margaret Watkins’ photographic exhibition just ended which welcomed almost three thousand visitors.)
One riveting image perhaps sums up the watchful young woman who arrived in Glasgow seventy years ago, peering through the slats of a Venetian blind, apprehensive but wanting to see what is there, on the outside and recording it in her own totally distinctive way.
The exhibition, the second in the series of ”Forgotten Women” is open Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am to 5 pm from Monday 1st March 2010.
January 21st, 2010
* Please note that the Margaret Watkins Exhibition has now closed *
With over 2,500 people walking through the doors of the Hidden Lane Gallery to view the works of Margaret Watkins, by popular demand the exhibition will now be extended. Originally intended to end this weekend, the exhibition will now run until Saturday 6th February. Opening times will be as usual however if you require a private viewing, please contact us on exhibition@thehiddenlanegallery.com to discuss further.
