Art – Duncan Stephen

Photo — 7 June 2020 — 2 words

Colour picker

Personal

Colour picker

Photo — 15 March 2020 — 22 words

We spent this afternoon doing something nice. Katie Paterson exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Culture

Totality

We spent this afternoon doing something nice. Katie Paterson exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

The Cosmic Spectrum

Article — 28 October 2019 — 240 words

Crawick Multiverse

Travel

At the weekend, we visited Crawick Multiverse, a land art installation in Dumfries and Galloway designed by Charles Jencks.

Article — 26 August 2019 — 1,184 words

After the Belgian Grand Prix — Days out in Spa and Brussels

Music — Personal — Travel

After our weekend at the Belgian Grand Prix last year, Alex and I stayed on for a few more days to explore other parts of Belgium.

Photo — 18 August 2019 — 117 words

Continuum — Bridget Riley — on exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery

Culture

Continuum — Bridget Riley — on exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery.

It’s Bridget Riley’s only ever 3D work. Entering inside it, I perhaps understood why. It wasn’t quite tall enough to fully immerse me.

I highly recommend you visit this if you can. It is a very comprehensive exhibition of her career, spanning more than 70 years, including paintings from this year.

The room containing her black-and-white works of the 1960s are of course a highlight. I am constantly in awe of how these static paintings can appear to be moving at great speed.

But I was also fascinated by the room containing her studies, where you can see her working out how to create these incredible mind-bending paintings.

Linknote — 21 October 2018 — 74 words

Culture

Will Gompertz on Banksy’s shredded Love is in the Bin

Will Gompertz explains what makes Banksy’s latest stunt a good work of art.

“At first I was shocked,” said the winning bidder and proud owner having decided to keep the work, “but I realised I would end up with my own piece of art history.”

All the more interesting considering the fact that it now transpires that the shredding didn’t exactly go to plan.

Article — 4 October 2018 — 1,312 words

Visiting V&A Dundee — Dundee dares to dream

Architecture — Culture

I had read some fairly mixed reviews about V&A Dundee — both the building and the exhibitions. So I had prepared myself to keep my excitement in order. In the end, I was largely delighted by both the building and the exhibitions.

Article — 28 July 2018 — 1,473 words

Letterboxing in Lundy — how not to get bored on a tiny island

Personal — Travel

This time last year, Alex and I went on holiday to Lundy. The island was best known to me as one of those mysterious locations of the shipping forecast. Somewhere between the Irish Sea and Fastnet, wherever that is.

Photo — 9 July 2018 — 11 words

Don’t look down

Culture — Personal — Travel

Don’t look down.

At the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.

Article — 7 July 2018 — 40 words

Day out at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Culture — Personal — Travel

We really enjoy visiting Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It’s a fabulous space, both outdoor and indoor. It’s large enough that you can’t comfortably see all of it in one visit, meaning every time you go you see something new.

Linknote — 6 June 2018 — 63 words

Architecture — Culture

St Peter’s Seminary rescue arts group to close

This is sad news. St Peter’s Seminary is probably Scotland’s most important brutalist building. I have wanted to visit it for years, and I was gutted to miss out on the Hinterland event in 2016.

I wonder what the future holds in store for St Peter’s Seminary, but the outlook doesn’t seem promising at the moment.

Linknote — 15 May 2018 — 187 words

Culture — Web

Hand-coded digital artwork “Francine” is skewing your online reality

I never used to see the point in stunts like “I created Bart Simpson in pure HTML and CSS, look at me!” But I have to admit that the work of Diana Smith is seriously cool.

It is all the more awesome when you consider how viewing it on older browsers turns the work into wonderful, glitchy, accidental versions that look like they were inspired by De Stijl.

This is like a modern version of the Acid tests. I remember showing examples of the Acid II test during presentations some years ago to explain how different browsers could interpret the same code differently. But I think this example gets it across so much better.

It’s also a warning not to build our webpages for Chrome only.

In a cultural moment where reality distortion is rampant, and it’s hard to get a consistent version of facts from person to person, it’s critical to understand that something as basic as a browser update, or switching from one browser to another, can drastically change the way we perceive information.