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ARTISTS FIGHT END OF PART-TIME COURSE

Submitted by Editor on

Working Lines – an exhibition of prints and drawings – previews on Howe Street this evening.

It features the work of four artists, one of whom is well known to many in Broughton and further afield in a different guise.

He's Trevor Davies, former Ward 12 Labour councillor and City of Edinburgh Council Planning Convener.

He will be showing prints and drawings of still-life subjects and landscapes. A detail from one appears above, and is shown in full at the foot of the page.

Davies and his fellow exhibitors – Marion Barron, Sheila Chapman and Ruth Thomas – are of course interested in displaying their work, but the show has another important purpose.

All four hope to raise awareness of Edinburgh College of Art’s part-time BA in Combined Studies, set to be scrapped soon following the institution's amalgamation with Edinburgh University. They and others on the course are trying to convince the College of its unique value to Scotland, and are asking administrators not to axe it once the current students qualify.

The part-time BA has been the only one of its kind in Scotland, and proved popular with young mothers, carers, retired people and others, many of whom spent up to seven years developing art as a career around work or family commitments.

Davies – now Honorary Professor in Urban Studies at Glasgow University – was just too late to apply. 'I'd completed a number of years in evening classes,' he recalls, 'and tutors told me I was ready to apply for what is a very tough programme of work over a number of years. Then I was told the course had closed.

'It was an immense disappointment and makes it more difficult for me to learn.'

Barron has now switched to a full-time Art degree course, but says she could never have started this lifelong ambition without doing the part-time course first.

'Unfortunately, mature students like me will no longer have the opportunity to study in this way. A door will be closed to them.'

Working Lines opens to the public tomorrow, and runs at the Edinburgh Ski Club (2 Howe Street) from Sat. 24 August to Sunday 1 September, 10am–6pm.

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