A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray
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God shows himself both merciful and humorous. The photograph was reproduced in the Glasgow Evening Times newspaper above the caption, Artist Alasdair’s Whale of a Picture, giving me a taste of that intoxicating publicity which turns stale as fast as it fades.
Jonah in the Fish’s Belly , 1951, pen and watercolour on paper, photograph of original work, now lost, 42 x 30 cm
THESE TWO PICTURES were made according to the rules of the Scottish Department of Education’s Art Inspectorate. The subject for a picture was given along with a piece of paper, then the student ruled round it a half inch margin at the top and sides, then at the foot a three-quarter inch margin in which the student’s name, class and number were written. When I became an art teacher years later I knew another who spent at least half an hour making his class draw these margins with parallel eighth-of-an-inch-apart lines at the foot between which their name, class, school and exact date had to be neatly lettered before their imaginations were told to work freely inside that careful frame. Luckily my own teachers were less inhibitive and only wanted pictures with such margins to show visiting inspectors. I could not take such ordered pictures seriously so filled the space with cartoon figures outlined in pencil, then drawn over with ink, then tinted with watercolours.
The Card Players was given to me as homework. To show the cards occupying the table top in an interesting way, I placed them end to end like dominoes, greatly annoying my father and mother because there was no such card game. I thought my picture made an interesting pattern out of several kinds of people, and if the game they were playing did not exist, such a game could be invented along the lines I had indicated.
Drawing Class , circa 1950, ink and watercolour on paper, 21.5 x 15 cm
The Card Players , 1951, pen and watercolour on paper, 21.5 x 15 cm
At first, half the teaching I got at Whitehill Senior Secondary School struck me as useless because not enjoyable. I was taught Latin because it was an entrance qualification to Glasgow University, and my parents wanted me to go there. The Latin text we used was Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and I loathed both warfare and Caesar. In Maths I appreciated the logical spaces of plane geometry, but when told algebraic equations were rational and irrational, possible and impossible, I stopped struggling to understand symbols grouped under such misleading adjectives. In Science classes I enjoyed experiments like those showing how great heat expanded water into steam and great cold contracted it into ice, but it became a matter of memorizing tables of elements and their combinations. I could only remember what I enjoyed because remembering more was a waste of mind, so with teachers who could not occupy my mind I surreptitiously doodled designs for alternative worlds on the brown paper jackets we had been ordered to put on our schoolbooks. This put me in danger of The Belt, then an often used instrument of torture. The only time it was used on me I nearly fainted, which probably saved me from further punishment. I was never rebellious or cheeky, just firmly absent-minded, so teachers of subjects I disliked accepted my poor exam results though my parents did not. I was freed from organised games and swimming by fits of asthma and eczema, while teachers of History, English and Art thought highly of my classwork. In my last two Whitehill years the head Art teacher, Robert Stuart, let me take any materials I wanted to paint anything I wished, only once murmuring that the examiners would like to see some carefully shaded pencil drawings of plaster casts. I ignored that suggestion. Until supplied with living people to draw, I preferred to paint from imagination.
My love of magic and miracles that made everyday life more exciting inclined me to make pictures of religious subjects, the more far-fetched the better. I also liked the clear outlines and strong colours of early Renaissance artists who painted such things. Mr Stuart’s art room had a lovely row of postcard colour reproductions of these along one wall. I maybe depicted Saint Christopher because he had been the selfish giant my most infantile part wished to be, before he started working for any who needed his help and grew good enough to carry a child who was God. Water, hair, hands and knees were suggested by Japanese prints, and the landscape beyond him by Tolkien’s Hobbit illustrations. The picture works as an overall pattern though the giant’s figure is impossibly grotesque. No teachers complained of me twisting bodies to fit my compositions. But I knew the distortions hid my inability to draw figures well. Egyptian, Greek, Renaissance artists and William Blake had painted vigorous people without much distortion and with no loss of imaginative force. I wanted to gain that glorious ability.
St Christopher , 1951, ink and watercolour on paper, 42 x 30 cm
God obsessed me because, while respecting my dad’s Agnosticism, I wanted the universe – everything – to have one great soul or mind or force that had allowed Jesus, Buddha and many others to show how we could make the world more heavenly, and would at last help us to succeed. The God of Jonah was that sort, by the miracle of the big fish saving the prophet to warn a city of its evil ways, and by the miracle of the gourd teaching him that evil springs from ignorance, and should be forgiven. I probably showed a clean-shaven God with a bald scalp and a lion’s mane of hair behind his ears because nobody else had done so. I should have given Him a better face.
If Jonah’s God was angelically merciful, the God of Exodus was a communal devil ordering refugees from Egypt to invade Palestine and exterminate the natives. Yet Assyrian inscriptions, history books and newspapers show such devils were commanding other nations then, and ever since. I had many arguments with a Christian school friend who found nothing wrong with the Exodus Jehovah and thought people’s evil actions were due to a false yet powerful god, the Devil. I believed the universe could only have one guiding soul with many aspects, and Christians who divided it into a good God and bad Satan, who would both at last have most people tortured for ever in Hell, were setting up the schizophrenic deity shown here.
And the Lord God Prepared a Gourd , 1951, ink and gouache on paper, 20 x 21 cm
Heaven and Hell (We the Saved – Thou the Damned) , 1951, ink and gouache on paper, 27 x 27 cm
In 1950 or ’51 my teachers and parents accepted I would never pass a Latin or Maths exam and enter university, and would probably become a local civil servant because nobody leaving secondary school in Scotland could start earning a living as an artist. This left me over a year to study and paint what I wished. In a history essay on the Industrial Revolution I mentioned Parliamentary Acts that turned common land into private property, driving families out of cottage industries into quickly built factory towns where steam-powered machines allowed cruel exploitation, which happened because wealthy folk strove to get richer fast, and ignored the misery they gave others.
My History teacher said my essay was “too personal” – it passed a moral judgement historians should avoid. We amicably disagreed about this and he suggested I put my views into a lecture for the Whitehill Literary and Debating Society, of which I was a very vocal member. These pictures were made to illustrate that lecture, being shown on a screen by an unwieldy projector called an epidiascope. Starting with The Ice Age and Stone Age man, the story of mankind followed with Keystone Cops rapidity. The worst of city life appeared as Human Sacrifice, the best as Babylonian Priests recording an eclipse, having devised an alphabet and calendar that made writing history possible. Moses