A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray
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Название: A Life In Pictures
Автор: Alasdair Gray
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9781847679628
isbn:
I could not draw Riddrie Public Library. It held a multitude of books I had found exciting, but the building was part of Riddrie Housing Scheme, the kind of good, pleasant, normal place where I thought everyone should live. But my imagination was not excited by the tree-lined boulevard, the shrubberies and bowling green from which streets radiated between houses with well-kept gardens, and converged on the highest building, which was Riddrie Primary School. It had been planned and almost wholly built shortly before I was born so gave me no solid sense of the past until, when 12, I discovered the Monkland Canal curving round it up the four huge water-stairs of Blackhill Locks. This quarter-mile of huge stone casemates and embankments was slowly turning derelict. If Rome had a modern housing scheme like Riddrie, and a young boy there had no knowledge of the Roman past, he would have felt as I did on suddenly coming upon the Colosseum. This canal proved people here had once done gigantic things, so might do them again – a wonderful idea.
Blackhill Locks , circa 1950, ink and wash on paper, 15 x 21 cm
Monkland Canal, circa 1950, ink and wash on paper, 15 x 21 cm
In the spring of 1952 my mother died soon after her 50th birthday. Most parents kill our infantile faith that we can have anything we want. Mum and Dad left me sure that I could make anything I wanted in words and pictures. I had started imagining a series of pictures called Acts of God, showing miraculous biblical episodes happening in present-day Glasgow, from the Garden of Eden to the Apocalypse. No boy of seventeen could start to make a living by his art in Scotland. My Leaving Certificate passes in Art and English (said Dad and the Whitehill Headmaster after earnest discussions) qualified me to become a paid trainee librarian who might make art his spare-time hobby, and advised me to apply for that. I would have preferred a rich friend to pay me a steady wage to paint anything I liked, and found one fifty years later. In 1952 Glasgow Public Library Department said I could start work with them in the autumn. Meanwhile I went to join a night school class in life drawing, because drawing naked men and women (preferably women) would teach me to paint people who looked less like caricatures. But this training would stop when I became a librarian who would have to work in the evenings.
Theseus and the Minotaur , 1952, scraperboard, 42 x 30 cm
Cartoons from Whitehill Secondary School Magazine , 1950–52
“And now Mrs Claveridge, I will delve into your subconscious mind.”
“It’s all very well for you!”
The Swot (or Beastly Swat) with his mortal foe, the common pupil.
“Don’t be selfish, Geraldine!”
The night school was in Glasgow School of Art, and applicants had to show the Registrar a portfolio of work, so he could reject those who only wanted to look at people without clothes. The Registrar, Mr Barnes, saw pictures shown in this and the last chapter – suggested I enrol as a full-time art student – told my dad that a government bursary could be got to support me. Dad asked what future would the Art School train me for. Mr Barnes hesitated, said most graduates became teachers of art, which was not possible for me as I had not a school certificate in Latin; however, very talented students were sometimes asked to remain in the Art School as teachers, and though he could not yet promise I would be one of those, it was a possibility. So I became a full-time art student. This was the luckiest event of my life, though I became the kind of student none of the Art School staff, including Mr Barnes, could have accepted as a fellow employee.
My wish to be a writer began at primary school, and at Whitehill a teacher of English, Arthur Meikle, encouraged this by making me his assistant as editor of Whitehill School Magazine.
My drawings on the previous page appeared in it, with some equally immature writings. I had also decided to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scot and (to differentiate it from Joyce’s first novel) would not have it ending with my hero leaving the city of his birth to become an artist, he would stay there until, maddened by a sense of failure, he took his life. I entered Art School determined, in my spare time, to make notes that would help me with that novel, though I had no intention of ending tragically myself. Memorable writers have never done so.
A View of Glasgow Cathedral from the Necropolis , 1952, ink drawing tinted with watercolour on paper, 30 x 21 cm
Five: Early Art School, 1952–55
A FOUR-YEAR art school training began with a two-year general course which included mornings of steady drawing and at other times, basic instruction in architecture, illustration, lettering, sculpture (mainly modeling in clay) and a craft (etching or woodcut or lithography or puppetry or ceramics or textile design) that we could change quarterly. There were also lectures on historic costume and, at much greater length, the history of art from the early Renaissance to early Impressionism. In the 1950s our teachers of painting thought Post-Impressionism was modern art and barbarous. Their own kind of painting could be seen for a month each year in the Royal Glasgow Institute exhibition at the McLellan Galleries, Sauchiehall Street: mostly portraits and landscapes Monet might have painted had he been timid and Scottish, with an inferior grasp of colour and design. Each month they gave a subject for a monthly painting to be made in the evenings or at weekends in the medium of our choice – watercolour, gouache or oil on paper, card or canvas. (Acrylic paint was not yet marketed.) At the end of each month our pictures were hung on screens in the Art School assembly hall for everyone to see and for a teacher to criticize.
In my last year at Whitehill School I had been allowed to study and work at what I liked without restraint, so my first year in Glasgow Art School often depressed me. The training was based upon the precepts of Ruskin. He said students should start to learn drawing by making outlines of simple things in pencil, then shading them with careful hatching and crosshatching until they looked solid. When our hands had learned skill by sketching boxes, bulbs and carrots we might draw plaster casts of architectural ornaments, a portrait bust, a figurine before we drew from life – a year of dull obedience would prepare us for free activity. I believed that the right training to draw something well was to draw it badly, then improve it. I stayed away from these dull lessons by pretending that my bad health kept me at home, where I concentrated on the monthly paintings. I wanted them to astonish and interest teachers and other students who would see them in the Art School assembly hall.
Afternoon Tea, Lamlash Guest House , 1952, gouache on paper, 58.5 x 46 cm
The given subjects often annoyed by their banality. The first (shown here) СКАЧАТЬ