A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray

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       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. In 2008 the only one exhibited shows Danae standing sadly while behind her the brass tower is built for her imprisonment. When 17, on a visit to Glasgow City Chambers, I saw the rest on the walls of a corridor, so Glasgow town councillors still enjoy them or they are in storage. I admired the glowing detail of Dutch still lives but did not know why people who could enjoy real fruit, flowers et cetera wanted pictures of them; nor did I see the beauty of Rembrandt’s butchered ox hanging in a cellar, and would likely have agreed with Ruskin that Rembrandt painted nasty things by candlelight. Twenty years passed before I saw that a great draftsman and equally great colourist had painted that ox in a range of subdued tones far beyond my capacities.

       Scylla and Charybdis, 1951, gouache on paper, 36 x 28 cm

       Young Boy and Paint Box , 1951, ink on paper, 33.5 x 25.7 cm

      What of the art class and its teacher? Jean McPhail, a fellow pupil in those days, describes her thus: Jean Irwin was an unmarried woman, belonging to the World War One generation which lost its men on the battlefields of Europe. Early in her career she became deeply interested in developing the creative talents of children and she set up and ran a free art class on Saturday mornings for children, especially for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. I did not know that anyone in the class was disadvantaged, but like every teacher whose help I appreciated she gave me materials and let me do what I liked with them. After the first two classes I cannot remember painting any subject she gave, unless she suggested a Christmas nativity scene, thus inspiring the picture of the three wise men, which shows my cynicism about wisdom when it beholds a miracle. She may also have suggested my ink drawing of the small boy at a desk facing mine. I tackled any theme that excited me, painting free-hand in poster paint without a preliminary sketch, or else making an ink drawing and tinting it with watercolour. Craving miracles and magic I illustrated episodes from Homer’s Odyssey, Greek legends and the Bible and am sorry to have lost pictures of Christ walking on water, Penelope unweaving, Circe making pigs of her guests and a Jabberwock unlike Tenniel’s. I drew and painted with a freedom I have hardly ever enjoyed since. Soon each new picture had a difficult beginning, starting with my efforts to unite Beardsley’s crisp black and white areas with Blake’s mysteriously rich colours. In the library of Dad’s pal Bill Ferris I found a book of Hieronymus Bosch’s pictures in colour, and was entranced by his Hells, and sinister Eden, and huge Garden of Earthly Delights. From then on any state bordering on Hell or Paradise fascinated me as a pictorial subject.

      In taking my prolonged private excursion through the galleries to the class one morning I found three or four upstairs rooms hung with all the greatest paintings and prints of Edvard Munch which I have since only seen in books. Munch painted Hell in the rooms and streets of Oslo, a city I saw was very like Glasgow, where very often the richest colours were in sunset skies. Munch, like adolescent me, was obsessed with sex and death. All his people, even those in crowds passing along pavements, looked lonely, all the women seemed victims or vampires. His white suburban villa, shown at night by street lighting, was appallingly sinister but not fantastic. He proved that great art could be made out of common people and things viewed through personal emotion.

       The City: Version One , 1950, gouache on paper, 42 x 30 cm

       Glasgow Art Gallery and Museums Exhibition Poster , 1952

      Two Hills – originally called The City – combined parts of Glasgow that had come to excite me. I loaded the nearer hill with a kirk, school, tenements, towers I had seen on Park Circus, and tied them by a railway line to a further hill with a housing scheme beneath a dark factory based on Blochairn Iron Foundry near Riddrie. In those days the soot-laden skies over Glasgow on moist, cold, windless days often seemed like a grey ceiling, with the sun an orange or crimson disc in the centre. (In the autumn of 1951 for several days a pair of sunspots were visible on it.) My Two Hills city picture, painted freely in poster colour, led to my only disappointment with Miss Irwin. She wished to reproduce it on the cover of the class yearly exhibition catalogue, and before it was photographed for reproduction a friend persuaded her to repaint the foundry roof so that it appeared seen from above like smaller buildings before the chimney stacks. This stopped the angle of the dark foundry roof sloping toward the sun and towers beyond, ruining the composition. I had combined two different perspectives, sometimes called viewpoints. In the 15th century Ghiberti and Donatello invented a perspective ruled by a geometrical vanishing point, since when most western artists before the 20th century found it useful. Good ones still made pictures combining many views that did not conform to single vanishing point perspectives, while ensuring most verticals and СКАЧАТЬ