Founded in 1826, the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture is run by artists, for artists.

An independent, non-governmental institution, the Royal Scottish Academy is governed by its Members to operate on a charitable basis. Known as Royal Scottish Academicians, the Members are prominent artists and architects elected by their peers.

Their publicly accessible collection is recognised as a Collection of National Significance, and they maintain an archive and library relating to the history of Scottish art and the activities of the Academy. 

Running a year-round programme of exhibitions, artist opportunities and events from their base at the Mound, Edinburgh, the Royal Scottish Academy gives over £300,000 to artists and architects through awards, residencies, scholarships, bursaries and artwork sales every year.

Informing national debates about visual, cultural and educational issues, the Royal Scottish Academy facilitates understanding and appreciation of the visual arts and promotes Scotland’s creativity internationally.

We are excited to welcome the Royal Scottish Academy to the Borders Art Fair 2023, where they will be showing a selection of their Members’ work. 

Alongside others, they will be showing work from the following Academicians....

George Donald RSA RSW

George Donald RSA RSW is a painter, printmaker and lecturer in studio arts. His calm and contemplative paintings of gardens, figures and landscapes combine colour, texture and pattern to delight, provoke thought or elicit meaning.

Donald was born in India in 1943. He graduated from Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art in 1967 and then attended Hornsey College of Art, London in 1969 and the University of Edinburgh in 1980. He was Lecturer in Drawing, Painting and Printmaking at ECA from 1970 until his retirement in 2000. Donald was also Assistant to the Vice Principal and Director of the Centre for Continuing Studies at ECA; Professor of Anatomy and Drawing at the University of Central Florida, USA, and has also been visiting lecturer in many overseas universities in countries including India, China and Japan.

George currently lives in the Borders and has also recorded some workshops for Borders Art Fair that you can watch here

Kate Downie RSA

Kate Downie RSA is an American-born British landscape artist whose career over the past 30 years has spanned the media of painting, drawing, printmaking, performance and film. Teaching, communal art making and curating are intrinsic to her practice. Downie's work responds to subjects as diverse as North Sea oil platforms, breweries, hospitals and bridge construction.



In 2010 Downie won the RSA William Gillies Bequest Award to travel to Beijing and Shanghai to work with ink painting masters. Following on from this experience, in 2011 Downie won a position on the Red Gate Residency programme, allowing her to return to China and develop her research. In 2013 the new methodologies and techniques that Downie discovered in China resulted in the exhibition Walk through Resonant Landscape, mounted by the RSA in conjunction with the Royal Glasgow Institute Kelly Gallery. 

In 2014 Downie was the Artist in Residence for the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Forth Road Bridge. More recently, the new Queensferry Crossing has become a key subject in her work. Having recently relocated her studio from Edinburgh to Fife, Downie's work is increasingly looking to the landscape of the east coast of Scotland. Downie has won numerous awards and residencies throughout her career and her work appears in public and private collections worldwide.

Henry Kondracki RSA

Henry Kondracki RSA was born in Edinburgh. Having been rejected from his local art school, he travelled to London to study at Byam Shaw School of Art (1981 – 1982), followed by the Slade School of Art (1982 – 1986). He has received the Cheltenham Drawing Prize, the Hunting Art Prize, the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize and has twice been the recipient of the Slade Fine Art Prize. His work is collected worldwide and exhibited regularly in London and Edinburgh.

Henry Kondracki RSA:

Ultimately, making any kind of statement about my work is difficult, for my work is a process of discovery, my aim to venture into uncharted territory; to set out a plan for my journey would ruin the adventure. Back in 1992 I said that ‘I build images that are a synthesis of thought, memory, emotion, fact and fiction’ and twenty years on I still try and adhere to this. So others are probably better than me at capturing some of my aims throughout my career and summing up my work generally.