A gifted West Kilbride artist has been honoured with a prestigious new art exhibition after picking up a lifelong award.

James Cosgrove is one of four artists who have been elected Royal Glasgow Institute of Art artists in 2014, and his work is now appearing at the new exhibition at RGI Kelly Gallery, 118 Douglas Street, Glasgow. The exhibition opened earlier this month.

More popularly known as Jimmy Cosgrove, he is an artist and designer who was a member of staff before being appointed deputy director at Glasgow School of Art. His recent work in painting, drawing and collage is derived from travel in general, and people and places in the west of Scotland in particular - including Arran and Ayrshire.

The lifelong award of ‘RGI’ to artists of distinction began in 1977. Artists are elected solely by their peers for artistic merit and their support for the Institute.  James said: “I will be showing a group of small works all related to a general theme called ‘A Series of Dreams’ which is the title of a song by Bob Dylan he wrote for his 1989 album ‘Oh Mercy’ but not included in it. The lyrics are about encounters of turmoil experienced in a succession of dream sequences. My pictures are about fleeting images and feelings experienced somewhere between a sense of being asleep and waking - not a conscious reality but an imagined state.” “I am not the kind of artist who likes to sit down with an easel, I prefer to use moleskin notebooks, I don’t do straight topographical landscapes - I like to use elements like if I see a strange building or something odd which has a strange shape to it. All of the images come from ideas and thoughts - things that appear in the sub-conscious, “My exhibition has based on Bob Dylan’s ‘Oh Mercy’ album - it has a strong thrusting rhythm beat to it, and it gave me flashes of ideas, the kind which you get when you wake up in the morning and your head is full of ideas, somewhere between a reality and a dream state.” A regular exhibitor at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Glasgow Institute, The Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour and the Paisley Art Institute, Cosgrove also exhibits widely in a number of commercial galleries.

He is a director with the ‘House for an Art Lover’ and has contributed to books on Art and Design, CR Mackintosh - and ART PARK Glasgow at Bellahouston Park, where he has a sculpture fabricated in iron and steel titled; ‘Shipbuilding - Homage to those who made the Clyde great’.

James is married to Janet, who was Principal teacher of art and design at Largs Academy for many years.

For more details about James and his work, go to www.jamescosgrove.co.uk/