Historic Colstoun House opening its doors for its first art exhibition

Landscape painter Joe Grieve is the first artist to have their work showcased at Colstoun House.

It has been the ancestral home of the Broun family since its first stone was placed nearly 1,000 years ago.

Mr Grieve is the first artist to be selected to exhibit at the house from the Colstoun Artist Residency, which began in 2022.

The residency offers artists space, time and access to the impressive countryside on its doorstep.

Throughout this year, Colstoun Arts is set to welcome artists from countries including Germany, Korea, China, France and the UK.

The plan is to develop a series of three to five exhibitions a year, including a residency group show, an emerging artist solo show, an established landscape artist group show, and a new collaboration with the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) to show work by Scottish artists focusing on landscape and nature.

Mackie Sinclair-Parry, director of Colstoun Arts, said: “Art has always been a part of Colstoun’s history.

“When you look at the walls and see hundreds of years of art collected through the generations, it becomes obvious why we should create a sustainable, progressive way in which to collect contemporary art and present it to the wider population.

“It started with the Colstoun artist residency but is now being expanded to include public exhibitions and collaborations with external galleries and museums.”

Mr Grieve’s solo exhibition, The Other Side, will comprise predominantly oil paintings, some involving a drawn figurative compositional charcoal underlayer, inspired by the landscape of East Lothian and featuring elements from the Bass Rock to North Berwick Law.

North Berwick Law is among the subjects of the exhibition

The large-scale paintings will fill the 100-foot-long space, which opens out onto the surrounding parkland and wildflower meadows.

Ahead of the exhibition, which opens on May 4, Mr Grieve said: “My time at Colstoun was peaceful and empowering. Being in a new and unknown thicket of nature allowed me to get lost in the rare magic that Colstoun offers.

“Being able to live and work in a totally new place with such vast lands to get lost in cleared my mind while painting.

“It opened me to this other side of life and creativity and was a marked contrast to city painting.”

Alongside the opening of The Coach House as the new gallery space, the house will open a cafe space serving teas, coffees and cakes.

Colstoun Arts will support the acquisition of artworks for the Colstoun Arts Collection, which includes works from established contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Robin Friend, as well as emerging artists such as Mr Grieve, Lara Cobden, Suhaylah H. and James Dearlove.