The Torrance Gallery Sunday Journals - No.1
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Some spaces feel designed.
Others feel gathered.
The difference is time - and a certain kind of eye.
Welcome to the first of the Torrance Gallery Sunday Journals, a weekly space to reflect on art, artists, and life in New Town, Edinburgh and beyond.
I came across a House & Garden Instagram reel recently that stayed with me. Cosmo Fry has lived in a Georgian rectory in Somerset since his twenties - a house slowly brought back from near ruin over the past forty years, and still very much a work in progress.
Speaking about the house, he says:
“With regards to decorating, I think I’m picture-led. The colours of the rooms are probably secondary.”
Most of us might begin with the room - choosing a colour, and then placing art within it.
Fry seems to work in reverse.
His collection has been built over time, and the rooms adjust around it. Walls shift in response to what’s hung on them, not the other way around.
A subtle reversal, but a telling one. The art sets the tone, and the space follows.
It’s something we’ve been thinking about in the gallery recently.
We’re due a new lick of paint and briefly convinced ourselves that Farrow & Ball’s Setting Plaster was exactly right - only to immediately think otherwise.
Choosing a wall colour for a gallery is its own kind of puzzle: a space that’s constantly shifting, with exhibitions that never quite sit still, and light that changes from morning to afternoon.
We’re trying to resist the pull of a clean white.
Though, inevitably, it may end up being a white - with just the slightest hint of something else.
This week I met one of our artists, Janette Sumner, as she delivered a new group of works - quietly confident, and rooted in her distinctive maritime world.
Next Sunday, we’ll spend a little more time with her practice and process.
Until next Sunday, Adam