IN A COUP for the Harrogate International Fringe Festival, Scottish musician and artist Edwyn Collins launched his festival exhibition with an impromptu performance at 108 Fine Art’s new gallery last Friday evening.

The former Orange Juice singer, who has returned to song-writing and performing since suffering two brain haemorrhages in 2005, sat in the crowded hallway of 108 curator Andy Stewart’s newly opened home gallery at Cold Bath House, in Cold Bath Road, sipping an Italian beer as he sang his best-known songs, Rip It Up and A Girl Like You.

Accompanying him were string players from the Scottish Philharmonic Orchestra – no mean feat, not only because Edwyn and the musicians had not rehearsed, but also because they were out of his view, gathered behind him in a small room.

Earlier in the evening at this invitation-only event, the Scottish quintet had accompanied the performance of Le Befana, a dark narrative work written by Adrian Wiszniewski, one of the New Glasgow Boys, who is exhibiting alongside Collins, his one-time neighbour in Glasgow, in a joint show entitled The Possibilities Are Endless.

They first met in the late 1970s when Collins worked during the day as an illustrator of urban bird life with Glasgow Parks Department and by night his band practised in a room next to Wiszniewski’s home.

Now drawing with his left hand, as his right hand is permanently clenched, Edwyn is exhibiting his studies of birds, hares, roe deer and portraits in Harrogate for the first time. Mugs, plates and a book of Edwyn’s drawings are available to buy, along with his original artwork and prints, plus copies of last year’s album, Losing Sleep, which features his art on the cover.

Wiszniewski, meanwhile, is showing his latest figurative works in oil, pastel and mixed media, some so new there are yet to be framed and are held in place only with tiny magnets.

The exhibition takes its title from when Edwyn’s double haemorrhages left him not only partially paralysed but initially able to say only his wife Grace’s name, “Yes” and “No” and “the possibilities are endless”.

The joint show can be seen at 108 Fine Art’s two galleries, Andy Stewart’s newly converted, formerly derelict house in Cold Bath Road and Crown Place, until August 27.