Highlights of the Edinburgh Art Festival

Few come to Edinburgh in August for the art but this year they should. The line-up for the official Art Festival is impressive and, happily, rich in painters. Foremost among them is Peter Doig, whose semi-retrospective No Foreign Lands is the main event at the Scottish National Gallery (until 3 November).

Doig was born in Edinburgh in 1959 and is being claimed as ‘one of us’. That he left the country as a baby should not stand in the way here; we need painters like this. For too long now, perceptions of art in Scotland have been skewed by the consistent success of Glasgow artists in the Turner Prize. As Doig himself has said, the influential art prize should not be the Turner but the John Moores, the annual award for painting that Doig won in 1993. Ken Currie, exhibiting new work this summer at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (until 22 September), has been outspoken about painting’s apparent lack of status in the current art school system but nevertheless it is painters in whom the National Galleries of Scotland have invested their efforts this summer.

And quite right too. The Peter Doig show is a remarkable thing. I defy any art student to view this exhibition and conclude that painting is over; that it has no relevance today. Doig’s work, which treads the borders of realities, carrying the viewer through landscapes real and imagined, is vital stuff. This exhibition shows work created since he returned in 2000 to Trinidad where he had lived as a child. Currie suggested recently that an artist will spend the years between 20 and 40 finding his voice. Doig was 40 when he went back to Trinidad, so perhaps we can view this show as a study of his maturity.