Smile on the artistic Face of Scotland

Glen Murray previews a bumper summer of exhibitions and celebrations in the South West

Follow the thread - colour coding is the key to copying the variety of the Spring Fling

THE SOUTH WEST is bursting with artistic energy again this summer and is forging forward as well as celebrating its rich artistic history.

The Spring Fling open studios event is the big, colourful opener to the season.

Having endured financially lean periods the Fling is relatively secure for the next three years due to funding from Dumfries and Galloway Council, the European Regional Development Fund and EventScotland's Regional Events Programme. This relative prosperity is allowing the organisers to splash out.

The event was launched in April with a series of press events themed around the Fling's six colour coded routes and involving local schoolchildren and participating artists, including internationally renowned labyrinth creator Jim Buchanan and CREATE artist in residence Lisa Gallagher.

Buchanan and Gallagher are among the 80 odd artists and makers whose work is on display from one end of the region to the other, usually in the environment in which it was created, between Saturday May 24 and Monday May 26.

The Spring Fling programme includes artists working in a huge range of disciplines, including architectural metalwork, artists' books, ceramics, clogs and shoes, gilding, glass, furniture, hats, illustration, installation, jewellery, mosaic, painting, drawing, mixed media, performance, photography, printmaking, sculpture, stone carving, textiles, willow and wood and producing some of the finest original art and craft in the country.

The event gives visitors the opportunity to meet the region's talented artists and makers, watch them at work and, in some cases, to have a go themselves.

This year the Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre is screening three art-related movies (Barbara Hepworth and the Potter's Art, The Mystery of Picasso and a bio pic about Jackson Pollock) to coincide with the Spring Fling (May 20, 21 and 22) respectively - details on www.rbcft.co.uk).

Since the turn of the Millennium Kirkcudbright has been gathering gravitas as a non-city centre for exhibitions of national significance, a process which will surely by enhanced this year when the Kirkcudbright 2000 group hosts The Face of Scotland: The Scottish National Portrait Gallery at Kirkcudbright.

The selection aims to give an idea of the scope of the National Galleries of Scotland's portrait collection. It consists of just over forty works depicting royalty, nobility, politicians, soldiers, writers, artists, actors and sportsmen and includes some of the most famous and iconic images of Scots ranging in time from the anonymous portrait of James VI through Charles Edward Stewart by H D Hamilton and Robert Burns by Alexander Nasmyth to contemporary images such as Robbie Coltrane by John Byrne and Donald Dewar by Archie Forrest.

Modern, recognisable faces are well represented. Mention of Hamish MacInnes by Bob Mclaurin, Muriel Gray by Iain Clark, The Queen Mother by Arikha, Rikki Fulton by Thomas Kluge and Mrs Thatcher by David Donaldson gives some indication of the diversity.

Everyone who sees the show is likely to recognise someone, which will give it wide appeal, and the inclusion of Tom Faed in His Studio by John Ballantyne is a nice local touch.

The Face of Scotland is in Kirkcudbright Town Hall for seven weeks from July 5 to August 25.

Kirkcudbright's big annual exhibition has tended to be the art highlight of the season in the South West, but this year it has some serious competition. South by South West: the story of art in South-West Scotland, which opens on June 3, is being billed as the largest survey exhibition ever held in the region - and it certainly is an ambitious undertaking. Ranging over 200 years of artistic activity in the whole of South West Scotland, the event is spread over three venues, each covering art from a substantial period of time.

To take in the whole exhibition in chronological order you'll need to start at the McLaurin Galleries in Ayr to see paintings and sculpture from 1780 to 1880, then head for the Tolbooth Art Centre in Kirkcudbright which covers 1880 to 1940, appropriately the heyday of the Kirkcudbright artists' 'colony', finishing up at The Dick Institute in Kilmarnock, which hosts the period 1940-2008.

If you're able to tour the show in this way you'll not only see some wonderful art but also a fair bit of the beautiful countryside that inspired much of it. If you're aiming to see all three parts do keep your eye on the fact that the Kirkcudbright one finishes much earlier (August 3) than the Ayrshire parts (September 20 and 21).

The organisers are to be applauded for investing some of the project's funding in subsidising a beautifully-produced, 232 page, small-format book containing introductory articles and colour photos, with explanatory text, of all of the pictures in the exhibition. The book which will only cost £2, making it much more accessible than many publications of this type.

'Collections and Collecting in South-West Scotland', Gillian Simison's introduction to the book, outlines the resources on which the project is based and how they came into being. It begins to reveal the network of connections between artists, collections, and galleries throughout the South West, which is further developed in three subsequent articles on the periods represented in each of the exhibition venues.

The range and diversity of the exhibition does justice to the wide embrace of its subtitle. It includes work not only by native artists and artists who settled in the area but also examples of how the area has been a source of inspiration and provided subjects to artists visiting briefly or just passing through.

The story starts with the 18th century engravings of Francis Grose, it takes in some of the great artists and classic works of Scottish landscape and portrait painting from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it features Glasgow Boys (and Girls), Scottish Colourists, civic stalwarts and radical stylistic departures from the early twentieth century and extends to the challenging contemporary work of Bruce McLean, David Nash, George Wyllie, Andy Goldsworthy, Christine Borland and three pieces commissioned specially for the event.

If in one or two cases the tenuousness of an artist's or a work's connection with the area might at first appear a little puzzling, considered as a whole, the selection leaves a powerful impression of the enormous richness and vitality of the South-West's contribution to Scotland's artistic heritage.

South by South-West has been produced by Future Museum, a collaborative project between East, North and South Ayrshire and Dumfries & Galloway Councils and the independent museums of south-west Scotland.

Future Museum has a dynamic, interactive website www.futuremuseum.co.uk providing free access to the museum collections of the area.