I am thrilled to have joined the ranks of Carla van de Puttelaar’s Women in the Art World portrait series, after a sitting in Edinburgh’s New Town last Autumn.
Photo: Fred Meijer
Carla van de Puttelaar
Carla van de Puttelaar is an Art Historian and Artist. She holds a PhD in Art History from Utrecht University. Her seminal book Scottish Portraiture 1644-1714 was published in 2021 and she is now writing a monograph about the English painter John Michael Wright (1617-1694). Alongside her academic practice, van de Puttelaar is an award-winning fine art photographer. In 2017 she began a series devoted to prominent and promising women in the arts entitled Artfully Dressed: Women in the Art World. Her intentions are to ‘showcase their accomplishments, intelligence, power, and beauty’. To date the series features over 550 international sitters.
Women in the Art World: Alice Strang
Carla and I are fellow members of the Scottish Society for Art History committee. Having admired her work for years, I shamelessly asked if she might be willing to photograph me, in my new guise as an auctioneer at Lyon & Turnbull. It is Scotland’s oldest auction house and I joined it as an Associate Director in 2021, after twenty-two years as a Senior Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS). With the aid of a black backdrop and natural light, Carla immediately put me at my ease and we settled on a classic auctioneering pose, gavel in hand. The necklace I am wearing is by Shelby Fitzpatrick and was a leaving gift from the NGS. It was important to me to reference my much loved former post. I am very grateful indeed to Carla for including me in her series and am in awe of – and inspired by – the achievements of my fellow Women in the Art World sitters.
For more on contemporary photography, you might enjoy this article about David Eustace, as well as this feature about Norman McBeath.
