YES!YES!YES!

In my lunch hour today I decided to visit the "Utopia" exhibition at Gracefield Arts Centre, which is only a few hundred metres away from The Usual Place. It has been organised by the Society of Scottish Artists (SSA ), to explore this idea : The idea of Utopia may be older than Thomas More’s famous book, but what could actually be gained from the concept, or possibly lost. A personal utopia would surely be as individual as each of us, and our own personal imagination. Is this the difficulty with any proposed Utopian society? The power of the individual would make the construct a contradiction.


I am no expert on art, but I have to say that I came away from this exhibition rather disappointed. There were three or four artists whose ideas excited me, although only two of these went on to excite me with their work. Some exhibits were single examples from a body of work, so out of context. One in particular I laughed out loud at (partly because of the ridiculous price tag). Others had "explanations" in the kind of artist-jargon-speak which (I am sorry) I find very tiresome. I keep reading it and I still can't understand a word...

And then I came upon this work by Sarah Keast, the only one of the artists I know personally. I don't think that this makes me at all biased. IT is physically painted onto the wall, so can't be sold and won't last. I have included Sarah's explanatory notes as an extra, also part of the writing, which is too small to see in my main photo.

AS I looked at all these three parts of the exhibit, I was saying to myself "YES! YES!YES!" Sarah, your art speaks to me on so many levels. It's brilliant. You won my vote straight off by being the only artist to have a dog in your utopia, but then...the swimming! The nature! The fact that the map looks like the vessels on the retina of the eye! The joyfulness of it all! 

Thank you :-)