I Leave My Home

I was in Edinburgh today to meet my friend, artist Ruth Nicol, at the Scottish National Gallery on The Mound.

I hadn't seen the big summer blockbuster exhibition by Peter Doig. It closes next week so didn't want to miss yet another big show.

My socks weren't blown off, I have to say. There were some paintings which hit the spot for their sheer painterliness, but in a playing field of many they were few.

Ruth and I had a great blether as we went round the exhibition. It's a real privilege to look around an exhibition with an artist.

I think many of the paintings were unresolved but I take my hat off to Peter Doig for having the courage to put them out there.

Some of the accompanying preparatory sketches were dizzyingly mundane.

On the other hand, some of his big paintings were brilliant. It really is in the eye of the beholder.


Black Curtain (Towards Monkey Island) was quite hypnotic. A curtain of squeegeed paint in front of a twilight view of an inlet which twinkles with stardust and light.

Grand Rivière was another tour de force. But for all the pluses, there were minuses.

Nothing divides people like art.

After the Doig, we went to The Fruitmarket Gallery to see I Give Everything Away by Louise Bourgeois.

This French-born artist, who died in 2010 at the age of 98, only gained recognition late in life.

Her career really only took off in 1982 when she was 70.

We started on the bottom level of the Fruitmarket with her Insomnia Drawings, 1994-1995, which Bourgeois made during an eight month period when she couldn't sleep.

As anyone will tell you who suffers from insomnia, the anxiety is beyond compare. These doodles, in chronological order, only make sense when you move up to the upper level.

In this section, you come to the heart of the exhibition, a group of large works on paper made in Bourgeois' final year, called I Give Everything Away.

I can't begin to describe the feeling I had when I walked up the stairs and saw these works.

I hardly knew which one to look at first but one, with a blood red heart-like motif underpinned by blue on the right hand of the picture stopped me in my tracks.

I felt my heart race and head spin. In the left hand side of the etching, Bourgeois had scrawled the words, 'I leave my home' in pencil.

If the Doig work had left me searching for an analytical response, this work left me reeling and i couldn't pin it down.

I felt excited - and bewildered. This is art which makes sense to me. There's no artifice. It just is there.

Go and see this exhibition it if you can. I need to go back.

There's also an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art of Bourgeois' sculptural work which I need to see soon.