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It's ironic that on the day Peter Howson unveils his newest and most challenging work to date, that the papers are full of images of his nude potrait of Madonna and her soon to be ex husband Guy Ritchie.

The celebrity strand of Howson's work - whether subjects or buyers - has always sat oddly with some of his more impassioned work.

These new images - inspired by the victims of the Irish famine - are much more in style and tone like his work from the Bosnian war, where he was official war artist in 1993.

Howson himself agrees. "There's at least one painting which is a Bosnian painting, I've just turned it into a famine painting, because war, famine, suffering, it's all the same," he says.

Although that period produced some of his strongest and most controversial work, it also took its toll on his health and the same seems to be true of his current project.

Advised by doctors to stop working all together - although he admits he's not been able to do that - he seemed weak and tired at the press preview for the exhibition. The subject matter is likely to be controversial but Howson says he hopes it will spark discussion and debate.

He says: "The whole point for me was to get across an anti sectarian message and get as many school children in as possible.

"Famine is not just about Irish Catholics, Protestants died too and famine still kills people today. If this makes them think, then that will be something.

"One of the most undignified ways to die is of starvation and people did literally due of starvation, there are people still dying of starvation today and that's what I want to draw attention to."

Howson's work is hugely popular - and despite the harrowing subject matter, these paintings are likely to be snapped up.

And that's good news for St Mary's Church in the Calton area of the city.

The church - and in particularly its extremely knowledgable parish priest Monsignor Peter Smith - assisted Peter Howson with his research when he first began work two years ago.

Its founding father was a priest - Fr Forbes - who spent three years fundraising in Ireland for the money to build the church. He raised £3,000 in 1842 - that's the equivalent of almost £6m by today's standards.

The Calton area was the focus for wave after wave of Irish immigrants. At one point the parish was the place of worship for 13,000 Catholics. These days, it's closer to 1,300 and that makes the job of raising money for restoration of the church even harder.

They've raised £900,000 so far, with some help from Historic Scotland who've noted its tourist potential but they need to raise the same again.

"Peter Howson came here and we talked about the famine and the impact it had on the people who came to this area, to start new lives and make new homes," says Monsignor Smith.

"He was interested in the work we've been carrying out and he promised he'd do what he could to help out."

Peter Howson kept his promise. Late last year, he donated two paintings of Brother Walfrid, who founded Celtic Football Club from the church hall, to a charity auction the church hosted.

This week he also confirmed he'd be giving a substantial percentage of the sale of all the artworks in the exhibition to st Mary's appeal. For Monsignor Smith, it's a generous gesture but also an apt one.

"What do you say when someone is that generous? Except thank you. It's going to make a huge difference to our appeal.

"It's a theme which touches at the heart of this parish. It goes to our origins as so many of the people in this parish came in the face of famine, looking for work, for food and a future for their children and they found it here."

Famine - New Works by Peter Howson is at St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art
29 May to 28 September
2 Castle Street
Glasgow, G4 0RH

Competition to decide who builds the new Glasgow School of Art building may have thinned out but it's no less intense.

Seven firms were shortlisted today - among them, the Glasgow-based practice Elder and Cannon, the Irish company Grafton Architects and Francisco Mangado Architects from Pamplona in Spain.

Their task? To build a new £50m student building for the expanded Glasgow School of Art campus - and no pressure, but it has to stand alongside Charles Rennie Mackintosh's iconic school.

Mackintosh of course famously won a competition to design that building.

He was not quite 30 and working for the Glasgow firm Honeyman and Keppie, so there's huge kudos in winning this commission which perhaps explains the phenomenal interest in the competition.

Nine thousand people expressed interest in the project by downloading the application form in the first instance.

The 153 companies who officially entered the competition gave a much fairer assessment of interest but the organisers say it is still "extraordinary and unprecedented".

With big hitters such as Lord Foster and Zaha Hadid allegedly interested, the only concern was whether the judges would be swayed by "starchitects".

But according to today's shortlist, they're not.

A good mixture of local and international, two of the seven have Glasgow partnerships, one is a completely Scottish operation.

The task now is to focus their final submissions for interviews with the judges, with the winner being announced in September and the new building up and running by 2013.

It will be interesting to see whether the winner - and the budget - allow the sort of design crossover that Mackintosh achieved in fusing arts and crafts and architecture inside and outside his building.and whether the new building is as fresh and iconic in a hundred years time as the Mac is today.

Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall was packed to the gunnels on Saturday night.

It wasn't simply down to the fact it was the closing night of the RSNO's current season, or the extraordinary performance by Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta, although both were worthy reasons in their own right.

The extra bodies - all 300 of them - took the RSNO up on their offer of free rail tickets and places at Saturday's concerts.

Swift damage limitation following the cancellation of their two concerts at Edinburgh's Usher Hall (builders and architects now working round the clock to make sure it is ready for the festival!)

The same number, to the RSNO's relief, took up the same offer the week before - including refunds on their Usher Hall tickets, and a 50% discount on the Glasgow tickets.

I'm sure most would agree it was worth the hassle, particularly for Sol Gabetta's enthralling performance of Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations.

All too brief, she followed up with a stunning encore of Dolcissimo by the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks, a technically complex and other worldly piece which had the audience on the edge of their seats.

I wasn't alone in straining from the upper circle to locate the offstage soprano, only to discover it was multi-talented Ms Gabetta singing, as well as playing.

Another RSNO regular was in the spotlight yesterday at Perth Concert Hall.

Christopher Bell and the had taken up the challenge of encouraging a thousand local schoolboys to get singing. Or rather keep singing.

According to research by Perth and Kinross Council, many boys stop singing at the age of 10 or 11.

The reasons, according to those I spoke to yesterday, included being worried about changes to their voices, that choirs just aren't cool and that they don't want to sing alongside girls.

The latter point was quickly resolved by making it a "boys only" event, the cool factor tackled with special dedications from actor Billy Boyd, WWE wrestling star MVP and local radio DJs (although I'm not sure David Cameron's endorsement necessarily upped the cool factor).

And as for the inevitable voice change, the Changed Voices Section of the choir were as good an advert as any for the benefits of singing.

The boys - from 76 of the 77 Perth and Kinross primary schools - took a little bit of warming up but the exuberant Mr Bell, who has been known to make grown men sing along while dancing like penguins, refused to take no for an answer.

By lunchtime, they were already meeting their secondary school teachers and signing up for school choirs.

And Debra Salem, who came up with the whole idea when she realised her son was one of the few boys from the area in the national boys choir, can rest easy.

As well as fielding a few more singers for the national choir, it looks likely that Perth and Kinross will now have a boys choir of its own.

Sounds like a spot of Whisky Galore could be just the thing to lift spirits at Pitlochry Theatre.

Several years ago, the theatre was one of a number of arts organisations told by the Scottish Arts Council that it couldn't rely on Foundation funding. Instead it had to seek funding on a project-by-project basis.

But rather than withdrawing quietly, the theatre seems to have become even more ambitious.

On Friday it opened one of its largest productions to date - and the first musical since Theatre was set up in 1951.

Whisky Galore, which is firmly based on the Compton MacKenzie book and not the Ealing film - was first staged in a much smaller version at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006 but this show features a cast of 14 who have to sing, dance and play everything from bagpipes to tin whistles.

Director Ken Alexander admits it was one of the hardest productions they've ever had to cast since being a rep company, actors also have to go on and appear in the season's other five plays.

On top of that, musicals are more expensive to stage but the company seems confident this will be the mainstay of the summer season, and may even have life beyond.

But the expansion isn't just onstage. Those who've had a peek behind the scenes will know Pitlochry has one of the hardest working back stage crews in Scottish theatre.

They're going to be even busier now that the production facilities have been expanded.

The theatre has raised £1.25m in a hugely successful fund-raising campaign to buy the old Hydro Board headquarters on the neighbouring Port-na-Craig House estate.

As well as providing much needed new rehearsal space, the massive Tank Room is now being developed into new production space for the increased demand for sets from other companies.

Pitlochry is quick to point out that they have historically received the lowest level of public investment in Scottish theatre so they've always had to generate their own income.

But in the current climate, it's even more admirable.

It already earns around three quarters of its annual income from Box Office, catering and retail.

It expects the new facilities within five years to be bringing in a further £100,000 a year.

There's an old tradition at Pitlochry Theatre that audiences applaud the set and scenery at the start of every show.

This year, it seems there's a whole lot of people behind the scenes who deserve that applause.

So the worst kept secret in literature is out.

Carol Ann Duffy is to take over as the new Poet Laureate (Andrew Motion's ten year tenure officially over as of midnight last night).

All this week, we've endured the poetic equivalent of football transfer speculation.

Simon Armitage is the favourite, Roger McGough already has the popularity vote but Duffy who was pipped at the post last time around, surely had to be in with a chance.

This morning, Downing Street confirmed that Glasgow born Duffy has the job - the first woman and the first Scot since the post was first created in 1668.

Already there's been much discussion about whether the delay in appointing Duffy was Tony Blair's nerves about appointing an openly lesbian laureate. Who, apart from the tabolid headline writers really cares about Ms Duffy's private life?

Much more relevant to her poetry seems to be the fact she's a woman and a mum (her poem A Child's Sleep one of the most tender of its kind).

And while she was once quoted as saying no self-respecting poet should have to write a poem for the wedding of the queen's youngest son, she's clearly got over her concerns.

Speaking on Women's Hour on Radio 4 this morning she said, "A poem will occur if there's a genuine beginning which comes from memory or imagination or a public event so if I felt in the event of a royal wedding inspired to write about people coming together in marriage or civil partnership, I'd be grateful to have an idea for the poem and if I didn't, I'd ignore it."

Duffy is already one of the best read poets in the UK today, largely thanks to her entertaining and accessible style and to the fact her work is on the school curriculum.

Her Scots roots are solid enough to guarantee her a place in any ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖcoming celebrations (although if the First Minister is to be believed, a holiday in Saltcoats is enough to qualify) but she left here when she was four and has lived in Manchester for the past decade.

But her first official visit here as Poet Laureate is bound to create a buzz.

And according to the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh's Royal Mile, that looks like being at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

The Princess' Blankets, based on her picture book of the same title is a folk tale about a princess who's always cold.

It'll be performed from August 15-26 by Carol Ann Duffy herself, and musician John Sampson, with a preview performance at the British Library on 2 May.

And while the literary world toasts her success, sad news about two losses from the Scottish literary world.

Tom McGrath - who has died from cancer at the age of 68 - was influenced both by the beat poets and by Scottish music hall. He had an amazingly colourful life - and knew everyone from Billy Connolly to Jimmy Boyle to Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, who he persuaded to come to Glasgow while inaugural director of the Third Eye Centre.

He helped found the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, wrote work for the Traverse and Lyceum in Edinburgh and countless screenplays for television. His final work was My Old Man in 2005, which he completed despite having suffered from a stroke two years earlier.

Meanwhile, the broadcaster, writer and poet Maurice Lindsay has also died. He was 90. As well as publishing his own poetry, he edited the 1946 anthology of Modern Scottish Poetry.

He forged the way in arts broadcasting too, fronting ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Scotland's first arts programme - Counterpoint.

I'm told the first edition had Benno Schotz modelling Hugh MacDiarmid live on air - the resulting bust stood in the entrance hall of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Scotland's headquarters in Queen Margaret Drive.

As they went live, one of the cameras malfunctioned and Dr Lindsay simply led the remaining camera across the studio to the sculptor and his model.

His ability to find a poem appropriate to any situation remains. He's even left a poem for his own funeral - first published in 1995 - called Directions for a Funeral.
Ìý
Don't hire some vacant priest to send him off
in 'sure and certain hope' of resurrection;
at such uncertain certainties he'd scoff,
so at the end would have no forced connection
with creeded superstitions, or the ways
some use toÌýrite their muffled passage through
the last experience, dulled by age's haze
when little that they feel or say rings true.
Rather, let music sound, if chance arise -
Bach, Boccherini, Haydn, Mozart; men
whose thoughts have raised him far beyond the skies
where heaven slipped its moorings; if not, then
read out some protest in the caring rhymes
he fashioned from the scuff of fractured times.