Who doesn’t like harmonica music?
Especially when it’s played by a spherical rat, walking on two legs, to a collection of antlike creatures gathered about his feet.
Possibly, the Nit Not doesn’t, to judge by the expression of vexed concentration on the face of the strange character below.
These are just a few of the myriad oddities who feature in Rachel Everitt’s intriguing new exhibition of dry point etchings at McNaughtan’s Bookshop and Gallery.
Everitt trained at Edinburgh College of Art where she graduated in 1999. Having specialised in animation, she went on to make several short productions which were broadcast on the BBC and Channel 4, and has worked on award-winning film projects with children since.
Now based in a studio in Leith, she says many of the works displayed here are inspired by people she meets and stories she hears. She says she ‘seeks to capture a moment in time, evoking a larger untold story in the viewer’s mind’.
The results are frequently funny, as in ‘The Ceilidh’ below, but never cloyingly whimsical.
Everitt’s characters are generally rather mythical, timeless and placeless, like those of Lear, Jansson, and Peake. And – as in Schulz’s Snoopy and Park’s Gromitt – they are also usually rooted in a sense of their own seriousness, however amusing we may consider the situations they find themselves in.
This reviewer particularly enjoyed the wonderful cross-eyed gravity of a stargazer …
the hesitation of a yellow bird …
and the universal need for warmth and companionship found in ‘The Visitor to Lochcarron!’
The latter is a short story, economically told with a minimum of fuss and great comic timing. Arachnophobes, look away now.
Further exquisite and suggestive moments await you in The Story so Far, which continues at McNaughtan’s Bookshop and Gallery, 3A–4A Haddington Place, until 24 December.—AM