A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray

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) was “An episode from your summer holiday” – the same subject as essays given once a year by teachers from primary school onward. The boy in the pinstriped suit is a caricature of me, helping to serve tea to fellow guests at the Holiday Fellowship guest house in Lamlash on the Isle of Arran. This again shows how much I needed to closely study human proportions. When hung in the assembly hall nobody spoke of it, but my first-year art teacher, Miss Dick, a truly gentle lady, told me the picture was a coloured pattern, not a real painting. A real painting showed bodies in a light that made them brighter on one side, darker on the other, and had them casting shadows. Nor did my picture suggest depth through lines of perspective – lines that would be parallel if seen from above, as in a map, but which, from nearer ground level, would appear converging to a point on a horizon level with the painter’s eyes, even if a horizon were not shown. Miss Dick, like most of her colleagues, shared the conventions believed in by the friend who had persuaded Jean Irwin to spoil the composition of my Two Hills picture. In 2010 I now think painting might be revived by some of these conventions.

      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