Just two weeks to go before our town’s creative community open their doors to let you glimpse behind the scene look at their workspaces and how they make their beautiful art.
The first ever Grantown Open Studios will take place on May 2-5 – an exciting chance to meet painters, photographers and more and learn about their craft.
Grantown Business Association is proud to support this fantastic event, which has also received funding from Highlands and Islands Enterprise.
A group of 15 artists and three galleries are taking part – you can follow the art trail by picking up one the leaflets circulating in the area or by downloading a copy.
The three galleries are well-known to you already – The High St Merchants, Open Space | The Vault and the Spey Bank Studio.
Let us provide a guide to each artist so you can plan your route!
*All artists’ portraits by Cairn Media.
Janet Anderson
Janet is an abstract landscape artist, whose work is inspired by her daily walks. Using inks and mixed media, she create organic patterns and shapes.
Janet’s artistic journey began later in life, encouraged by her daughters, who recognized her innate creative spirit. She pursued formal training in art, earning an HNC in Fine Art (Environmental) from Reid Kerr College in 2005 and an HND in Public Art from Anniesland College in Glasgow in 2006.
Clare-Louise Battersby
Clare-Louise is an artist from Aberlour, whose work is a celebration of Scotland’s landscapes, wildlife, and rich folklore. Drawing inspiration from myth, nature, and the ethereal beauty of the natural world, her pieces feature intricate layers of mixed media techniques, blending texture, colour, and storytelling to create immersive works of art.
Her current textile project explores the intricate beauty of moss and lichen, with hand-stitched and beaded details, using natural, locally sourced, and upcycled materials wherever possible. This work highlights the delicate ecosystems found within the Scottish Highlands.
Linda Brooks
Linda is a fibre artist who has been honing her craft for several years. Specialising in needle felting, she creates stunning fibre and wool paintings inspired by animals and wildlife. Each piece is a one-of-a-kind creation, meticulously crafted using a barbed needle as her paintbrush and fibre as her paint.
Linda incorporates local wool into her work, celebrating the natural materials of her surroundings. She also creates wet-felted vessels, a technique that uses water and soap to interlock wool fibres into a fabric that can be sculpted into beautiful, functional shapes.
Jane Fox
Jane is a ceramicist, working mainly in porcelain and stoneware from her Wildcat Pottery Byre Studio, outside Grantown.
Pieces are wheel-thrown and hand-built using textures and colours from the forests, moors and local coastlines. Jane particularly likes the use of transparent glazes for textured and sea inspired pieces and experimenting with glaze combinations on functional earthy stoneware.
Angus Grant
Angus Grant is a painter, craftsman, and teacher, whose work features the lochs, mountains and wildlife of the area. His paintings capture the dynamic interplay of light across these landscapes, reflecting the ever-changing environment of the Cairngorms.
Angus is also an art and design teacher at Grantown Grammar School, as well as co-owner of the Spey Bank Studio.
Jess Greaves
Jess is a photographer with a focus on nature. She uses multiple exposures, digital and dark-room techniques, and alternative processes (often combined) to explore the inter-connectedness of humans and the natural world, our ancestral synergy with the earth, and our way onwards as these interactions are weakened and lost.
Creating photographs that are personal, yet all-encompassing, she seeks a deep nature connection. Her artwork is familiar yet opens doors to a more rooted experience within the environment.
Wendy Grosvenor
Wendy Grosvenor (BA Hons Fine Art) is a visual artist living and working in the Scottish Highlands. She graduated with honours Moray School of Art in 2021. She focuses on sensory, physical experience. Her medium is image, sound, words – spoken and unspoken. Inspired by the natural environment that surrounds her, she notes and considers a sensory response through her art practice.
Eleanor Honeyborne-Healey
Eleanor works in her studio above her business, The High St Merchants, creating pieces using acrylic, mixed media and on occasion, oils. Her subjects are primarily landscapes, crofts, foliage and deep-sea creatures. Recent pieces have been focused around the Dava Moor – the moody sky, the ever-changing light, the red roofs on the crofts and the solitude have been an inspiration for her to explore.
As well as painting, Eleanor makes resin jewellery, many pieces incorporate items found whilst out walking, including feathers, leaves and flowers.
Myrddin Irwin
Myrddin is a photographer and outdoors person who has lived and worked in the Cairngorms for more than 10 years. His work focussed on Scottish landscapes, biographical portraiture, and product photography. The remote mountain and wilderness areas of the Scottish Highlands are the inspirations for his work.
Myrddin also uses analogue photography, specifically using a large format 5×4 camera to create ambrotype and tintype images.
Rona Kant
Rona developed her passion for painting when she moved from Glasgow, to the Scottish Highlands in 2000. Inspired by the majestic surroundings of the Cairngorms National Park where she lives, she started to paint in acrylics to capture the light and convey the intense colours that are evident in her work today.
Continual creative development is an important element to Rona’s work. She is always learning and researching new processes and skills, which has led to her expanding her repertoire to include oil painting.
Louise Ogilvy
Louise’s artistic journey led her to formal studies in art, specialising in architectural stained glass. This beautiful and traditional craft is now a tangible part of her future, as her dream of building a home in a historic threshing mill has recently come true. This exciting new chapter will allow her to establish her own art and stained glass studio, Dreggie Stained Glass, in the Cairngorms, a project she feels deeply passionate about.
Her first project will be a stained glass window celebrating the diverse wildlife of the surrounding area. Louise hopes others will join her in witnessing the evolution of this unique and inspiring endeavour.
Justin Prigmore
Justin has a Masters Degree in Ecology and has worked until recently in nature conservation for organisations including the Cairngorms National Park Authority and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Justin has been drawing and painting for as long as he can remember, but it was while living in Colorado in his early twenties, that he re-discovered his love of wildlife.
Travel is an essential part of Justin’s work and he has visited the US, Canada, Africa and Europe, searching for inspiration and studying wildlife in its natural habitat.
Chris Rose
Chris specialises in wildlife painting, particularly birds in their habitats. Working mainly in oils and acrylics, his paintings are inspired by the colours and patterns found in natural landscapes. Although executed in a realistic style, his paintings are often underpinned by abstract shapes. He is frequently drawn to the small and intimate corners of the landscape that are often overlooked by the casual observer. He has a particular interest in depicting water, exploring the myriad effects of translucence and reflectivity.
Joanna Wilson
Joanna’s art is a paradox of thoughtful drawing and exuberant expressionism. Born and raised in the Highlands, there is a lilting quality to her handling of form reminiscent of the glens where she grew up. Her figurative compositions often incorporate industrial elements, which seem to reference the urban environments where she has also lived. She graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art and the Wimbledon School of Art, before work and further study took her to the Hayward Gallery, the Royal Albert Hall and Yale University.
Joanna helped initiate the Grantown Open Studios event in partnership with the Grantown Business Association, with the aim of sharing Grantown’s creative energy further afield.
Yellow Broom
Yellow Broom are Clare Waddle and Dave Robson, a two-person collaborative design studio in the countryside outside Grantown. Blending backgrounds in visual art, design and contemporary craft practice, YB create sculptural thought proving functional pieces.
This pair traditional heritage making techniques such as steam bending and contemporary wood turning with modern construction methods resulting in high quality work that carries a timeless minimal aesthetic that can be passed on through generations.