A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray
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Название: A Life In Pictures

Автор: Alasdair Gray

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

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isbn: 9781847679628

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СКАЧАТЬ teachers taught the rule as if it should never be broken. At Whitehill, my ordinary day school, schoolteachers had taught me that rule without insisting on it. Later, at Glasgow Art School, I met teachers of painting who did – they belonged to a late 19th-century academic tradition that urged everyone to paint like Velasquez with some early Impressionist freedom of brushstroke. One of them thought modern art had started going wrong with Cézanne’s still lives, which flagrantly broke the single viewpoint rule – he had not noticed the landscapes behind the Mona Lisa did so too, and that the ceiling and floor of the room where Jan Arnolfini and his wife stand have different vanishing points. In the Two Hills city picture I had combined different vanishing points instinctively. From then on I did so deliberately. The final version of the picture is the result of two reworkings, made years later by repainting some areas and taming most by drawing round them in ink.

       The City: Version Two , gouache, pen and ink on paper, 1951, 42 x 30 cm

      Seeing how much she had shocked me Miss Irwin apologized, and was too good a friend for me to bear a grudge. She lent me a big book with colour plates of work by the great Flemish masters which delighted me as much as the visions of William Blake. How different they were! Blake’s men and women are gods and goddesses acting in mysteriously colourful universes lit by impossibly huge suns, and enact glorious, sombre or terrifying mental states. Blake, like Michelangelo his teacher, thought elaborate clothes and furniture were devices commercial painters (like Sir Joshua Reynolds) used to flatter wealthy patrons. I agreed with him before I started enjoying the well-lit landscapes and rooms of the Van Eycks, and Van der Weyden and Memlinc with floors of beautiful tiles, well-laid planks and richly-woven carpets, yes, and panelled walls and carved furniture, richly-woven tapestries and views across gardens and bridges to houses and towers of grandly built cities. The people occupying these spaces usually wore rich robes, but often had the careworn faces seen even among prosperous citizens in a big city. The great Flemish painters were then portraying a mercantile society in which even the wealthiest folk appreciated how the goods they enjoyed were made. The separation between owners and craftsmen was not the gulf it became in the time of Rubens, whose main patrons were monarchs. The Flemish masters taught me that anything or anyone in the world, carefully looked at and drawn, is a good subject for art and therefore (as I still believe) beautiful. The artists of the Sienna and Florence republics could have taught me the same, but I liked the ordinary-looking Flemish folk more than the graceful Italians. Study of Van Eycks’ reproductions left me knowing that every detail of furniture and ornament in a room can appear beautiful if painted with a loving care that, years later, I brought to some pictures of domestic interiors, but only had time to complete a few of them as I wished.

      Jonah in the Fish’s Belly now only exists in a black and white photograph, though the original was an ink drawing tinted with watercolour. I wanted to emulate Blake’s Book of Job illustrations by also making a biblical book one of mine, so naturally I began by reading the shortest, and was delighted to find the Book of Jonah had less than three pages, and was the only Old Testament book where 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

       Four: Schoolboy Work, 1947–52

      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 СКАЧАТЬ