The Blogger has stumbled on buried treasure...in Penicuik! It was gleaming faintly, in the darkness of an industrial estate, and could so easily have been passed by. But there it was, through the windows of the Crystal Business Centre, just off Eastfield Road – an exhibition of paintings, prints and photography by the Edinburgh-based artist, Alan Beattie Herriot.
The reception area of the CBC makes a surprisingly excellent gallery, with its light and spacious dimensions, and Herriot’s work here – a combination of land and seascape and Edinburgh views – is vividly alive with the shifting colours, the scents and the swell of the sea (“Tantallon”), the movement of cloud and wind (“White Sands”), and the sizzle and shimmer of the rain on the cobblestones and pavements of Edinburgh (“The Royal Mile”).Equally worth checking out, are “Morning Light”, “Port Seton Harbour” and the congenially abstract “Yellow Table”.
The Photography includes arresting studies of Rosslyn Chapel, the Scott Monument, from directly below. This represents a crudely limited selection of the work on display, in what is an intriguing and rewarding exhibition, and I would urge you to catch it before it ends on September 18th. The BCB is open from 9am till 5pm every day.
Elsewhere, The Road House hosted the Penicuik Folk Club for an evening of good old fashioned folk, singing good old fashioned folk ballads. No drunks, no fights. Perfect.