Grayson Perry: Smash Hits

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A magnificent vision of the elements in full force’: Joan Eardley’s Winter Sea III (1959). Photograph: Andrew Smart/Estate of Joan Eardley. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2020 I don’t make the kind of art that’s an international bland paste you can put up in any great white hangar anywhere on the globe. I’ve always tried to make things that are very much of my own culture. But at the same time, I rob loads of other cultures – which is just part of being British after all. Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, until 6 January 2024

Many of the Scottish women artists celebrated in this gathering at Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios are very well known. But the first woman represented here is entirely forgotten: Catherine Read. Born near Dundee in 1723, she might have received no education at all had her family not had to flee Scotland for France after the battle of Culloden. In Paris, Read studied with the pastel portraitist Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. Her own portraits became so popular they were reproduced everywhere as prints. I’m never afraid of being local and of my period. I don’t think Raphael worried about being an international artist or what people would think of his art in 500 years’ time – he just got on with it.verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

A section of In Its Familiarity, Golden (2015), the second part of the Essex House Tapestries by Grayson Perry, on display at the Scottish Royal Academy, Edinburgh. Photograph: John Sinclair And Walton’s own self-portrait, so imaginative, shows her asleep but soon to be woken by her small son tugging at her hair with a brush. Walton’s career foundered altogether during her short-lived marriage. And then I thought, nobody’s going to go on a pilgrimage to see Alan Measles, so why not take Alan to the people. This motorcycle is a mobile shrine for the Teddy Bear God. I rode it in my special bodyguard’s outfit, carrying Alan on a progress around Germany. I chose Germany because as a child they were the enemy, but in truth they were just an unconscious metaphor for my stepfather. The bike reflects my personal growth. Alan is depicted on the front mudguard as a warrior; in the shrine on the rear he is a guru. Grayson Perry: Smash Hitsopened at the Royal Scottish Academy building last month and has been jammed ever since. It deserves its popularity. Perry has so much to say about Britain past and present in terms of sex, class, folklore, fashion, drink, drugs, politics and his own DayGlo icon of a self that whole show is a thrumming conversation. I often ask gallery directors when their next Tory exhibition will be, because they’re always having exhibitions about very progressive subjects. You’ve got to tease the Left nowadays because they’re just as full of pomposity and orthodoxy as the Right.I’ve always liked the fact that, because I make so many kinds of artworks, when somebody sees an exhibition of mine, they might think it was a product of a civilisation rather than a single artist. And so I thought, I’d better have a god, because all civilisations have a god. Alan was the ideal candidate, because teddy bears are imaginary characters on to which we project our positive feelings, ie gods.