A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу A Life In Pictures - Alasdair Gray страница 12
Название: A Life In Pictures
Автор: Alasdair Gray
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9781847679628
isbn:
The given subject of this picture was “Washing day with a minimum of three figures” which I found depressingly banal until, near the Art School, in a lane overshadowed by the backs of tenements with fronts on Sauchiehall Street and Bath Street, I saw a court with washing line two floors above the lane. Nearby at ground level was a half-withered-looking hawthorn tree with a bough that looked overgrown through reaching for sunlight. I recalled Blake’s etching of a lone figure about to climb a tall thin ladder whose top rests on the crescent moon. Behind him a lovingly entwined couple and the words beneath are “I want! I want!”. The women with headscarves and aprons like surgical gowns are like a home help who attended to our house in my mother’s last illness. The three figures, three cats, three washing tubs, three close entries are arranged to lead the eye round about the nearly symmetrical view. They cast no shadows, but the buildings are so shadowy nobody spoke of that. The main lines of the scene give an illusion of traditional geometrical perspective, though anyone using a ruler to discover the vanishing point on an invisible horizon would find the picture has two or three. I called this The Beast in the Pit.
The Beast in the Pit , 1952, ink and watercolour on grey paper, 55 x 30 cm
The Pointillist carpet, gaudy peonies and wallpaper here are colourful inventions to compensate for so much brown, otherwise the picture is true to the clothes of the Gray family and our living-room furniture. We ate at this card table, setting it up before the fire – I moved it to the bay window to give the composition a symmetrical frame. My sister had a bandaged foot when I sketched her. My chin and Dad’s profile were stronger than shown here. He would never place roast meat on a table while Mora spread the cloth and I presided wielding the ornamental teapot we never put to use. Despite elements of light and shade, notably in the tablecloth, the picture is united by the very flat dressing gown my mother had made from an army blanket. It was thick, comfortable, stately. Alas, my first wife chucked it out.
Three People Setting a Table , 1953, gouache on paper, 56 x 76 cm
Malcolm Hood , circa 1954, ballpoint pen on paper, 30 x 21 cm
This is Malcolm Hood, the life-long friend I made in my first year at Art School and liked for the sense of humour we shared, and for qualities I lacked. His calm, firm, gentle manner suggested life was interesting, and often funny, but never surprising, horrid or overwhelming. He was handsome and well-dressed. This profile makes him look like an impassive Assyrian autocrat. Nearly 30 years later I used another drawing of him in the title page of Lanark, Book 4. This, adapted from the title page of Hobbes’ Leviathan, gives Malcolm’s monarchic head to the man-shaped crowd dominating Scotland.
In January 1953 the given subject was any scene from Tam O’Shanter. I chose the moment when Tam shouts, “Weel done, Cutty 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 СКАЧАТЬ