A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray

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 horizontals did; but academic art 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,