A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray
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Sark!” The mass of naked witches are not “withered beldams, old and droll” as Burns describes them. I made them horribly plump, hoping their appearance would shock attractive girl students who had not noticed my existence. (This happened.) There is strained topographical truth in the road connecting Alloway’s “auld haunted kirk” with the brig over the Doon, and also the Burns memorial mausoleum in the park beyond it. I tried framing the scene between lightning flashes on the left reflecting ivy stalks on the right, though alas, the owl does not balance the flight of geese. I think the scene had enough cast shadows to please Miss Dick.
Tam O’Shanter , 1953, Indian ink and watercolour on paper
My oldest friend is George Swan. Like many Glaswegians he lived before marriage with his parents. Theirs was a one-room-and-kitchen flat in a four-storey tenement with three flats on each floor, shared lavatories on the communal stair. George’s dad, like mine, had fought in World War One. He had been a picture framer, then grew blind and worked on the production line of Singer’s sewing machine factory, Clydebank. This gentle, patient man sat for me at home with his back to the kitchen sink. The moonlit tower contains the central staircase of Duke Street Hospital in Dennistoun, seen from behind and long since demolished. The portrait was drawn with Indian ink on plywood, then tinted with enamel and oil glazes. I left some woodwork in the kitchen sink unit almost untouched, and only slightly darkened Mr Swan’s skin colour. I gave this portrait to the Swan family. It was returned to me with apologies because it made him look old and blind and his wife never thought of him like that. My home was a three-room-and-kitchen flat with a lavatory bathroom, but in my first Art School years I sometimes felt more at home in the Swans’ Dennistoun kitchen than in the living room of the Grays’ Riddrie home, perhaps because George’s home still had a mother. After his wife died Mr Swan lived in Fife with George and his daughter-in-law Rose. George, after working as a Glasgow engineer, had become an editor with the D.C. Thomson Press and his house is a fine bungalow in a middle-class garden suburb. Mr Swan, missing the noises of neighbours in a crowded old working-class tenement, said, “Every day sounds like Sunday here.”
Portrait of Mr George Swan at Home , 1952, ink, gouache, oil and varnish on wooden panel, 76 x 56 cm
I often made pictures with symmetrical frames in them, most clearly in this still life. The ornaments on our piano stool, the slippers beneath it, belonged to my sister, whose photograph is in the tortoiseshell frame. The pattern of our living-room carpet was not as bright as I painted it. In my first two Art School years Mora still attended Whitehill School, so was painted more than anybody else, since I was painting at home. When the given subject was musicians I showed her sitting on the stool, playing our upright piano. I lacked patience to paint the black notes but the sheet music on the floor, brass-topped table with still life in front, small square panes in the upper sash windows were in our living room, also the sofa with wooden arms – a bed settee where my parents and (latterly) father slept so that Mora and I had a bedroom each. The music teacher, cat, barometer, sacred heart picture, patterned cushions, curtains, carpet and wallpaper are invented or remembered from elsewhere. This picture was later damaged but I restored it in 2007, with improvements to the porch and view outside.
Still life with Green Slippers and Piano Stool , 1953, gouache on paper, restored with oil and acrylic 2006, 76 x 56 cm
One month in 1953 the subject was the self portrait on the frontispiece of this book facing the title page. This certainly used cast shadows, dramatizing my loneliness against a tenement in the Drygate. To this ancient district under the shadow of the Necropolis (now covered by Tennent’s Brewery) I added a section of the Monkland Canal that was nowhere near it. I envied cats for seeming at home anywhere and tried to join background to foreground with a line of them chasing each other. The original was in sheer black and white. In 2006 I added colours.
Of paintings lost from this time I most regret one on a biblical subject of our own choice. I painted a crucifixion with an emaciated Jesus being nailed by two modern British privates to a cross like a noticeboard. I mention it here because I used the same figure in my first mural painting discussed in chapter 7.
The Musicians , 1953, gouache and acrylic on paper, 56.5 x 88 cm
I cannot imagine how my art would have developed had the Art School let me paint subjects of my own choice. The general course was meant to prepare painters who would use oil colour if allowed, in their third year, to specialize in easel painting. Before then we had no training in oils. To plaster, wooden and canvas surfaces oil paint can be applied in clear glazes, even layers or thick as mud – Rembrandt’s Flayed Ox in Kelvingrove Museum was painted in all these ways – that only a very competent, confident teacher could demonstrate them. My own first attempts with oil paint kept giving me accidental colours I never intended, but so subtle and lovely that I spoiled my main idea by trying to include them. I gave oils up till years later, basing all my shapes upon firm drawing, chiefly using the mediums of Miss Irwin’s class and Whitehill School – opaque, fast-drying poster colour, mainly used in flat or patterned areas with distinct edges, sometimes drawn with a brush, or a detailed line drawing tinted with watercolour or inks. I never painted vague or indistinct things, and luckily in my second year I was at last allowed to draw what I had most wanted from Art School, living human bodies. I produced a large portfolio of life drawings of which all but six were later lost or stolen, but these six show the love of clear outline, and distrust of shadow that was too great to win our teachers’ approval.
Miss Dick regretted that my pencil drawings of naked or near naked people firmly outlined subcutaneous muscles and bones which she thought should be suggested by delicate shading which I never attempted, being incapable of it. Trevor Mackeson, a teacher I became friendly with, asked if I needed to make the people I drew look ugly and tortured. I said they didn’t look that way to me. Davie Donaldson was the best painter of the Art School’s staff. On overlooking me drawing from life one day he asked exactly what I was trying to do. I said I was trying to explain to myself the shape of the figure in front of me. “Really?” he asked. “Yes.” I answered. In a resigned way he said, “Ach well son, carry on, carry on.” At our monthly shows in the assembly hall a teacher would single out pictures as good or bad examples. Mine were never mentioned. Maybe my peculiar reputation was responsible.
Art School Life Drawings , 1953, pencil on paper, 42 x 30 cm
Life Class Interior: Student Model , circa 1955, gouache and ink on paper, 30 x 42 cm
The Art School shop was run by a pair of friendly widows, Mrs Mitchel and Mrs Cochrane. When I was their only customer one day one of them said, “Miss Dick says you’re a genius.” I felt bothered and unhappy. Both were watching me closely, then one asked, “What do you think of that?” I said, “Miss Dick does not know me well enough to judge.” If genius is known by work that others dare not call good or bad, then it is a damnable label to have attached. Most people, fellow students included, would make only two remarks about any picture of mine: “Very interesting”, then, after a thoughtful pause, “You certainly put a lot of work into it.”
Life Class Interior: Woman with Red Shawl , circa 1955, gouache and ink on paper, 30 x 42 cm
In the summer holidays most