A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray
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no sport with other youths, was fascinated by girls but afraid to touch them so never went to dance halls. I had friends but only talked freely to them one at a time, so was not asked to parties. But the chaotic inner feelings and ideas (some splendid, some horrible) that made me socially awkward were, I knew, the essential raw materials of art. I became sure I could paint and write any big thing I imagined, if allowed time to work on it long and hard enough. This confidence in my artistic abilities and contempt for my character or social self – except as a source of raw material – is perhaps frequent among artists, and helps us survive in societies with no use for us.
Note that the pictures I most loved and learned from all had clear outlines. I must have feared or distrusted anything vague or liable to shift and depart. Making a picture is one way of stopping some shapes of things changing – stopping time as long as the picture lasts. It is not strange that over the years I became more and more fascinated by the difficulty of depicting moving water and clouds, and those times of day and weather that Turner (that other great Cockney William) painted so wonderfully well.
This union of confidence in work with a highly interested, but basic contempt for my self is frequent among artists, and perhaps many other folk.
Three: Miss Jean Irwin, 1945–52
IN 1945 WE came home to Riddrie. In Wetherby I had played with other boys of my age, climbing trees, making dens in bushes, damming streams. I had a mental map of what was then a small market town on the Great North Road after it crossed the River Wharf, with the hostel my dad managed, racecourse to the east, the school and church on a cross-roads to the west. From walks and cycle rides I knew the countryside around it with the villages Bilton and Bickerton. I was now old enough to discover that Riddrie was one suburb of a huge smoky industrial city where my family was an unimportant detail – Glasgow was too big for me to mentally grasp.
Dad’s unsuccessful efforts to get a better job than cutting boxes on a machine, Mum’s worry about money and the future were also depressing. He found relief most evenings in unpaid secretarial work for the Camping Club of Great Britain (Scottish branch) and in weekend climbing and camping excursions on which he would have loved to take us all. Mum could no longer enjoy these. I could but usually refused to go because I hated being guided by his greater knowledge and experience of open-air life. I also had the excuse of very bad bouts of mainly facial eczema alternating with asthma attacks. These enabled me to stay at home in the small bedroom, at the small version of a senior executive’s desk my dad had made when his hobby was carpentry. Here I sat scribbling pictures and illustrating stories of magical worlds where I was rich and powerful, fantasies nourished by escapist literature borrowed from Riddrie Public Library, early Disney cartoon films, BBC radio dramatizations of Conan Doyle’s Lost World and H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.
One day Mum put some of my scribblings in a handbag and took me by tram to Kelvingrove. She had read in a newspaper that Miss Jean Irwin held an art class on Saturday mornings in Kelvingrove, and I believe she hoped (though she never said so) that this class would get me out of the house and give me more friends. Children in it were supposed to be recommended by teachers, but my mum was an independent woman. A half-hour tram ride brought us to Kelvingrove, not yet open to the general public, but she swiftly got admission from an attendant who explained where to go. We went up broad marble stairs and along to a marble-floored balcony-corridor over-looking the great central hall, and I heard exciting orchestral music. At the top of more steps we saw twenty or thirty children busy painting at little tables before very high windows, painting to music from a gramophone, as record players were then called. I drifted around looking at what these kids painted while Mum showed my scribbles to Miss Irwin, who let me join her class.
Miss Irwin’s class , circa late 1940s
For the next five years Saturday mornings were my happiest times. This once-a-week sense of unusual well-being partly came from dependence on appliances like those in most British homes which, apart from the lighting, were mostly pre-electric. Our hot water taps drew on a tank behind the coal fire that warmed our living room. Baths were not taken casually and Friday was my bath night. Mum washed clothing in a deep kitchen sink, rubbing it a piece at a time on a ribbed glass panel in a wooden washing board, squeezing water out by passing it with one hand through a small mangle (which we called The Wringer) into the shallower sink, while turning with the other a handle that made the cylinders revolve. Bedclothes were then hung to dry on our back green clothes lines, other clothing on the kitchen pulley or a clothes horse before the living-room fire. After that she ironed them. Washing machines only became common in Britain halfway through the 1950s. Mum may have worked hard enough to give me a change of clothes twice a week, but I only remember how fresh newly laundered socks, underwear and shirt felt when I dressed on Saturday morning.
If the day was warm enough to go without a jacket I felt the whole city was my home, and that in Kelvingrove I was a privileged part of it. The art class children came an hour before the public were admitted, I was always earliest and could therefore take the most roundabout way to the painting place, starting with a wide circuit through the ground floor.
I first turned right through a gallery with a large geological model of Strathclyde near the door. It had a pale blue river, firth and lochs, and layers representing rocks painted to show how the valley and hills had been laid down in prehistoric times – pink sandstone predominated. Beyond were glass cases of fossils, including an ichthyosaurus, and uncased models. The tyrannosaurus was most impressive, and a great ugly fish with two goggle eyes near the front of his head instead of one each side, and big human-looking buck teeth. I left that gallery by an arch under the skull of a prehistoric elk with antlers over six feet wide.
The Three Wise Men , 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 41 x 51 cm
Then came modern natural history, the shells and exoskeletons of insects and sea-beasts, a grotesque yet beautiful variety showing the unlimited creativity of the universe. Some I hardly dared look at and would have preferred them not to exist. A spider crab had legs splayed out as wide as the antlers of the elk. Then came stuffed birds and animals in cases with clues to their way of life. I seem to remember a fox bringing a pheasant’s wing in its mouth to small foxes under a shelf of rock or under a tree root. Big animals were in a very high gallery behind large glazed arches. An elephant with its young one, a giraffe and gazelle had a painted background of the African veldt; an Arctic scene had walrus, seal and polar bear with fake snow and ice floes. A Scottish display had stag, doe and fawn, capercailzie and grouse among heather.
I have no space to describe my delight in the sarcophagi, ornaments, carvings and models of the Egyptian gallery – the splendid model samurai seated in full armour before the ethnography gallery with its richly-carved furniture, weapons and canoe prow from Oceania and Africa – the gallery full of large, perfectly detailed models of the greatest ships built on Clydeside. The ground floor displays assured me that the world had been, and still was, full of more wonderful things than I could imagine for myself.
After these wonders there was relief in the long, uncluttered floors of upstairs galleries in one of which our art class was held, but I always approached it through as many others as possible, so became familiar with the paintings on permanent display, though my preferences were distinctly juvenile. I loved two huge Salvador Rosa landscapes with biblical titles (one of them The Baptism in the Jordan) showing rivers flowing between rocky crags overhung by wildly knotted trees. I wanted to jump into this scenery and play there when the tiny figures of Jesus, saints and apostles had cleared out.Noel Paton’s The Fairy Raid delighted me too by mingling the Pre-Raphaelite details of a moonlit woodland with several sizes of supernatural races, from courtly fairies almost human in scale down through dwarves and goblins to elves smaller than toadstools. In those days there was a whole wall of Burne Jones paintings, at least four, showing the adventures of Perseus which I had read in Kingsley’s The Heroes.