RSA ANNUAL EXHIBITION 2008 ****

ROYAL SCOTTISH ACADEMY, EDINBURGH

VICTORIA CROWE ****

THE SCOTTISH GALLERY, EDINBURGH

ART FOR ROSIE ****

OPEN EYE GALLERY, EDINBURGH

THE Royal Scottish Academy is under new management. Not that there was anything wrong with the old management. Far from it, but time and tide and all that; people retire and a new team takes over.

The new president, who succeeds Ian McKenzie Smith, is Bill Scott. Arthur Watson is secretary and Ian Howard is treasurer. The RSA is one of Scotland's most venerable professional organisations, but it was pretty comprehensively beaten in the takeover of its building by the last director general of the National Galleries. Under Ian McKenzie Smith and the new director general, John Leighton, a much better working relationship with the National Galleries was established. Meanwhile, the RSA began to pick itself up and pull itself together again.

No doubt adversity focuses the mind, and in consequence of what happened there has been a lot of rethinking about the Academy's role and its place in the art life of Scotland. It has begun to be more proactive, while seeking to widen its membership. There is now an exhibition officer on the staff and there is an effective PR team. An enterprising exhibition programme has been running in the part of its space the Academy still controls, and the Salvesen scholarships it administers have offered a really important career opportunity to a succession of young artists.

From last year, too, the annual exhibition has been reshaped by the incorporation into it of a curated element. This year this ancillary show is called New Scots. A reflection on how much we have gained by the presence in Scotland of artists who have chosen to come here to live and work, it has been curated by Sandy Moffat, himself a new academician. As a former anti-establishment figure, his election personifies the Academy's new thinking.

It must be said too that although the Academy has lost so much, the annual show has also gained greatly from the rooms recovered by the reclaiming as exhibition space the Academy's former picture store on the lower floor. This has relieved pressure on the annual show and even with nearly 350 exhibits this year, including two rooms devoted to architecture, the cluttered effect has gone and it all seems spacious and airy.

The annual Academy show is always a combination of meeting old friends and making new acquaintances. Appropriately this year, as you enter you are met by a nicely enigmatic small bronze by the new president, Bill Scott. Called A Measure of Personal Space, it is like a little room that is at once open and closed. It may not be a deliberate comment on the demands of the role of president perhaps, but it could be read that way. Also in bronze is Crossbill Arch by Gareth Fisher. It is a beautifully chunky model of one of Scotland's most distinctive birds, sitting on an open arch as though posing for its monument. Among new acquaintances, for me at least, are Johannes Sailer and Roland Engerbretsen. Sailer's Sick in Paradise, a shrouded figure hovering above daisies, seems to reverse the usual arrangement. Engerbretsen's moth in a lightbulb, called Catch 22, is an intriguing piece of complicated miniaturisation.

Katharine Aarestad is another among the less familiar artists whose work here suggests they may become better known. Her painting, Let me undress her sometimes, on the face of it is a simple scene of two Victorian girls with a doll, but it manages to have sinister overtones reminiscent of Max Ernst.

Among the painters, it is always worth waiting to see a new work by Duncan Shanks. His Flower Power is a still life of flowering plants that has the scale and energy of a landscape. Philip Reeves is artist who never disappoints. Shift is a simple double rectangle. Disjointed along the centre by the eponymous shift, it is austere and beautiful.

Ian Howard, the RSA's new secretary, is also the first principal of Edinburgh College of Art since Gillies to be a serious painter. His Tabula Rasa II is a beautifully reflective picture. The weight of his duties have certainly not reduced him to a Sunday painter. Hanging next to it, John Mooney's Still Life (Pitchers) manages to be painstakingly detailed yet commands attention from a distance. John McLean's Skirling's Wynd, a joyful, ascending composition of shape and colour would be commanding too, were it not hung around a corner.

Phil Braham surprises with a new departure. Instead of his familiar moody landscapes, he has painted nothing but a big dark sky. Against it, autumn leaves catch the light and make little patches of gold and silver as they blow in the wind. It is very beautiful. Arthur Watson combines word and image in a grand rendering of Haar, a great Scottish word for a special Scottish phenomenon and a chill manifestation of Presbyterian weather.

Some Academy stalwarts are absent this year. Will Maclean is represented by two small but exquisite works, but he does have a major show in London that opened concurrently with the RSA's, so it is admirable that he managed to contribute at all.

Sam Ainslie is the most prominent of the new Scots in the ancillary show, though she has been for so long naturalised you might have forgotten that she was not a native. She has a scarlet wall to herself for two rather beautiful paintings of mysterious leaves and fabric. Thomas Joshua Cooper, American by birth, is another artist who has made a really distinguished career here. He is represented by a selection of his magnificent photographs. Among the younger newer new arrivals are David Shrigley and Nathalie de Briey. The latter's watercolours of objects in the Hiroshima Peace Museum are very moving.

Meanwhile at the Scottish Gallery, another academician and new Scot, Victoria Crowe, is showing new work. These are predominantly landscapes, but never simply so. Autumn and winter seem to be her seasons and her painting is often pervaded by their quiet melancholy. There are several pictures here of bare trees stark against the sky, for instance, but she layers her work with collaged elements of images and even passages of writing that take them away from simple landscape or indeed still life. By this means she creates exquisite and often complex surfaces. These make the beauty of what she has seen become present to us and bring to it the sort of associations, the memories even, that such a scene would conjure. The effect is to create a sense of time passing. They are remarkable and truly poetic pictures.

At the Open Eye, Art for Rosie represents a remarkable act of solidarity and collective generosity. Almost 100 artists have given works to create an endowment for Rosie Donald, the two-year-old granddaughter of academician George Donald. She was left fatherless when his son Ninian was killed in an accident last year. The occasion is touching, but the art is also very good. All the works are A4-sized and many leading artists have contributed including Elizabeth Blackadder, John Houston, Alan Davie, Will Maclean and a great many others. It is a sort of mini-RSA.

&149 RSA Annual Exhibition until 25 June; Victoria Crowe until 31 May; Art For Rosie until 28 May.