Edinburgh artist Julia McNairn White returns to The Sutton Gallery on Dundas Street for a new exhibition featuring over 20 new oils depicting Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens. The exhibition, which opened just yesterday 29 July continues through the festival season until 3rd September.
It is a bold and colourful extravaganza that will brighten up even the dreariest of summer’s days.
McNairn White is no stranger to depicting the natural side of Edinburgh and the Lothians’ beauty. Her two previous sell-out shows at The Sutton Gallery have focused on The Meadows and the coastline around North Berwick respectively. This work also saw her rewarded earlier in the year with a major exhibition at Durham University, showcasing work from the 1990s onwards. It was a particularly important milestone for McNairn White, as, while her work has well reviewed across the national press in the 80s and 90s, she took time away from painting from 1999 – 2014 to focus on her family. She has only been back exhibiting regularly for three years, and the speed with which she has managed to pick up and surpass where she was over fifteen years ago is remarkable.
In this new exhibition, McNairn White works on a smaller scale than usual, replacing her characteristic bold brushstrokes with more in-depth and intimate detail of the herbaceous borders, rocky paths and oriental gardens that make the Botanics such a distinctive feature of Edinburgh. The beautiful details of a “Castanea Tree” and “Dawn Redwood”, for example, or the dappled light of a pathway in a piece entitled, “Lush Green”, which certainly lives up to its title.
The Sutton Gallery director Reuben Sutton describes Julia’s work as “calming but quietly impactful”, stating that “it’s a great pleasure for us to be showcasing Julia’s work to visitors to Edinburgh for our festival exhibition. She has a rapidly expanding following in Edinburgh and this exhibition will only widen that.”
