A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray

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       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 art students, especially those from working-class homes, enlarged their grants by taking a temporary job, but in 1953 Dad allowed me to stay at home to write my Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scot. With the plot complete in my head there was now enough material (I thought) to write the book quickly, but the first few sentences on paper proved that I lacked a decent prose style. Hitherto diaries and school essays had been filled by writing as I talked, pouring out thoughts as they sprang to mind, but a narrative in that gushing voice was not convincing. I struggled to make my words calm and unemotional, especially when describing emotional disturbance. I learned to use as few adjectives and adverbs as possible, and to not describe what people feel when their actions and words convey it. After two months I returned to Art School having managed to write only what finally became chapter 12, and the mad visions in 29. The book was growing and mingling with ideas for a modern Pilgrim’s Progress inspired by Kafka, as Edwin and Willa Muir interpreted him.

       Nude at Red Table , 1954, ink and coloured papercollage, 61 x 32 cm

       Reclining Nude , 1955, ink on paper, 61 x 32 cm

       Nude on Chair , 1954, felt-tip pen and paper collage, 70 x 48 cm

       Anatomy Museum Sketches , 1954, ink on paper, 30 x 21 cm

      Mum’s death, and my alternating asthma and eczema bouts, left me fascinated and horrified by the structure of bones, nerves, veins, glands, muscular and connective tissues that amount to a human being. I felt the horror could best be overcome by understanding them as Leonardo and Michelangelo had done, by studying morbid anatomy. I asked Mr Barnes to help me apply to Glasgow University Medical department, for permission to sketch in their dissecting room, but I was only allowed to sketch pickled and bottled specimens in the department’s museum. I soon stopped doing so. Drawings like these gave too small an idea of how the living limb would work. The specimens that disturbed me were monstrous births like the cyclops and two-headed baby which may have been exhibits originally acquired by John or William Hunter, the 18th-century instigators of modern surgery who founded the university’s Hunterian Collections. They proved that the nature of things – which for me was how God worked – could give dreadful undeserved pain to innocent folk, pains that nuclear radiation and warfare would multiply.

       The Artist in Wartime , 1954, poster, 76.5 x 51 cm

       Student Poetry Reading 1 , 1955, poster, 51 x 76.5 cm

       Student Poetry Reading 2 , 1955, poster, 76.5 x 51 cm СКАЧАТЬ