A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray

comic. The water lay in folds of sculptured drapery held up by cherubs happily kicking their legs – marble or bronze winged babies who would have been eight or nine feet high and weighed several tons had they stood on the floor. To what was visible within the great buildings I preferred the sight of them and the people and streets outside. I saw why Matthew Arnold said that the British should learn to build beautiful cities from Italy. Yet in Venice I enjoyed much of the labyrinthine mystery of Old Town Edinburgh.

       Sketches from a Workman’s Hut and Building Site , 1954, ballpoint pen on notepaper

       Marriage Feast at Cana , 1953 Indian ink on cartridge paper, 104 x 95 cm

      Meanwhile I found several faces for my Marriage Feast picture among my fellow students, and the grief-stricken face of Mary at the head of the table came while doodling in a notebook. I thought it appropriate for the mother of many sorrows, though on this occasion she need not have looked so unhappy. She was a Jewish mother urging her son to perform his first miracle – turn water into wine. He did, after complaining that she should let him decide when it was time to start out on his miraculous career. (Years later an Orthodox couple I met liked this picture because they said it described a typical Jewish mother–son situation.) I meant to make this picture something I had not before attempted – a big oil painting on a hardboard panel. Back in Glasgow I had no time to do that. Mary and the disciples were drawn separately with Indian ink on cartridge paper, then cut out and pasted together on a larger sheet of paper backed by hardboard. Unable to imagine the face of Jesus I depicted the scene from his viewpoint at the foot of the table. Only his naked arms appear, one hand making a gesture of refusal, the other of acceptance. I drew them from my father’s arms and now see that I too have small, sturdy hands like his. They are the only successful part of the picture. A disciple’s head at the end of the left row peeled off and has never been replaced. Five years later I gave the picture as a wedding present to Malcolm Hood and his wife Joy, borrowed it back to have it photocopied, and left the original too long with the photocopying firm. When I went to collect it the firm no longer existed so the original was probably destroyed.

       Minister with Ominous Street Scene , 1952, linocut with addition of pen and acrylic in 2006, 30.8 x 26.2 cm

       Book of Jonah , 1954, lithograph, 15 x 25 cm

      This picture ended my first two Art School years of the General Introductory Course, after which the students chose the department in which they wished to specialize, with a second choice in case that department would not take them. I wished to specialize in painting pictures to be hung in rooms and galleries, but the teachers in the Painting Department did not want me. They liked pleasant pictures and none I had made were very beautiful. I might have been accepted if Hugh Adam Crawford had still been head of painting, a great painter under whom Colquhoun, McBride and Joan Eardley studied. Crawford had annoyed the Glasgow Art School governors by mingling with his students as their social equal. They so curbed him that in 1945 he left for Aberdeen School of Art. More will be said on this subject, but the Art School department that accepted me was my second choice – Mural Painting.