The Weekend

On Friday we made a journey to Kirkcudbright, on the Dumfries and Galloway coast. We had been, for the first time, in June and stayed overnight so we could have a good explore of the town. I had long heard of Kirkcudbright as being a painters' town with good light and scenery but it was first recommended to me by a curator at the Gracefield Art Gallery in Dumfries. We had called in to look at the art on show and it just happened to include a number of the works of the Glasgow Boys, which we admired. The curator explained that may of the artists would go to Kirkcudbright and surrounding area on the summer and suggested the pretty town was worth a visit. That was a few years ago and it took til this year for us to go.

The Kirkcudbright Galleries has only been open a year and is housed in the original town hall and gathers together the work of many of the artists who lived and worked in the town. It is a good space on three levels and when we were there we were told of an exhibition of the work of one of the former residents which was about to open. Sadly, we missed the opening day but we did vow to return to view it. So on Friday we drove through horrendous rainy weather along the A75 but as we pulled into the town at about 11.30 am the rain stopped and it remained fine for the rest of the visit.

The exhibition was of the work of Charles Oppenheimer (1875-1961) an extremely talented artist and draughtsman from Manchester whose family owned a mosaic manufacturing business. He worked as an artist and mosaic designer and even when enlisted in the forces in WWI used his artistic skills. The gallery had a good range of paintings from private collectors as well as loans from various institutions and covered a range of paintings about Kirkcudbright and its surroundings and the many continental holidays he and his wife took.  Most were landscapes of various sizes in watercolour and oils. The most interesting thing, I found, was that when he returned to painting after the War his paintings seemed to get tighter and taken on a more formal, smoother style, abandoning his earlier looser, more painterly style. Often, it seems, it is the other way round in that as an artist gets older the style gets freer.

It was well worth a visit, as was the cafe within the gallery where the cheese scones (made inhous by a member of the cafe team) were excellent. Worth a return visit for that alone!