What's wrong with this map?

I'm just home from a jaunt to Edinburgh for the festival - the highlight of which was undoubtedly Paul Lewis playing Beethoven, which deserves a blog post in its own right. I also went to the Generation exhibition of contemporary Scottish art at the National Gallery (Steven Campbell is a highlight but David Shrigley stole the show). The map above is on the wall there. It shows all the art venues taking part in the exhibition. There are more than 60 of them around Scotland, and although they reach up to the islands, and down to the Borders and Dumfries and Galloway in the south west, there's a huge hole in the north west.

Why? It's not as if there are no contemporary artists or galleries in this part of the world. What about An Talla Solais in Ullapool? What about the craft village at Balnakeil? What about all of the artists in Assynt? I have ranted before in this blog about the way our arts agency, HI-Arts, was eradicated, and I can't help wondering if things would have been different if it had been there to advocate for all of the Highlands and Islands to be properly represented.

I've recently become the proud owner of a Peter White painting. I never thought I could afford such luxury, but I bought this when the aforementioned An Talla Solais held a sale. It emerged from Peter's practice of drawing and painting from photographs of people who died in concentration camps and gulags. I wrote about this practice in an interview with Peter here. It's an immensely powerful painting, an honouring of a victim of inhumanity, and I feel proud to be able to welcome this unknown person into my home, give them a place at the table, show them some respect. I am moved by this painting daily: that beautiful mouth, those questioning eyes.

An Talla Solais ran its art sale in an effort to improve its dire financial situation. Could this have anything to do with being overlooked by the mainstream arts world, we have to wonder? If anyone down in the Central Belt is reading this, hello! We have art up here as well and we're trying to keep it alive. We are not nowhere, and our artists are not nobodies. Please put us on your map!