Visual Archive

Picture the scene.

This is the year Peter Doig comes home.

Time was when the main event for Hogmanay in Edinburgh saw revellers gather en masse outside the Tron Kirk on the corner of the High Street where the bells would be seen in with inebriated abandon.

As the late Glaswegian social sculptor George Wyllie observed, "Public art is art the public can't avoid." Having spent two years getting under Wyllie's skin as an artist and as a man, thanks to my involvement in the year-long Whysman Festival that celebrated his life and legacy, I think he'd have enjoyed Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller's Sacrilege.

Dimitris Daskalopoulos is very wealthy and successful, and one of the world's leading and most driven contemporary art collectors.

THEY have called it the Glasgow Miracle, a research project that is delving into the archives of the city's Third Eye Centre and discovering contracts and correspondence, still photography, film and video work that documents the key figures who performed at the venue at 350 Sauchiehall Street, now home to the Centre for Contemporary Arts.

I view every day as a school day, especially when it comes to writing this page on new exhibitions opening in Scotland.

As well as having one of the longest exhibition titles Scottish gallery-goers will have faced on a poster – the full spread runs to a breathless 22 words and twice mentions death – the vast show of painting, sculpture and video art opening in Edinburgh next month may also be one of the most challenging.

One of my recurring dreams is that I'm at an art exhibition with no clothes on and a crowd is gathering in front of me waiting to hear what I think about the work on show.

In many ways John Bellany has always faced east – to the sea, during his childhood in the East Lothian fishing village of Port Seton; to the Low Countries and Germany, where as an art student he found inspiration in the work of Rubens, Rembrandt, Max Beckmann and Otto Dix; even to China, which he visited in 2003 and where he painted The Bundt Shanghai, a colourful scene of the city's famous waterway.

Despite the exotic name and her equally exotic appearance, French-born, New York-raised artist Niki de Saint Phalle could have been a Glaswegian.

If there is one painting, John Bellany says, that could sum up how he fought depression, illness, alcoholism, heart attacks and tragedy – and survived them all – it would be this.

His friends called him Terry.

'Home Sweat Home" reads the sign that has happily hung in my kitchen in the Highlands for the last 20 years, since the day my late dad, the artist, George Wyllie, made it.