Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  Finally, I acknowledge the support of Mad Toad, Crazy Shuggy, Tam the Bam and Razor King, literature-loving friends in the Glasgow Mafia who will go any length to reason with editors, critics and judges who fail to celebrate the shining merit of the foregoing volume.

  Of Alasdair Taylor: Painter*

  THE ART OF PAINTING IS IN A POOR WAY. The ambitious pictorial talents try for film and television while decent second-raters (the backbone of any industry) are lost to advertising. We needn’t regret this. As Peggy Guggenheim said, the 20th century has already enjoyed more than its share of great painters. In the first fifty years of it Bonnard, Braque, Burra, Chagall, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Matisse, Mondrian, Munch, Nash, Picasso, Rivera, Rouault, Schwitters, Sickert, Soutine, Spencer and a dozen other fine artists were working contemporaries. If no such list of painters can be made today we can balance it with a list of creative film-makers. Paintings, of course, are still produced and sold for big sums. As a means of non-taxable banking, painting lags far behind the diamond industry, but it is still ahead of secondhand postage stamps. Our monetary system still has a use for an occupation which, since the big studio-workshops of Medieval and Renaissance times, has dwindled to a cottage industry. The galleries of the large dealers are close to the major stock-exchanges, and if such a dealer decides some new canvases can be propagated as sound investments, the maker of them has a chance of working in comfortable conditions.

  Scotland, however, is a notorious low-investment area and pictorially speaking we have never recovered from the depression of the thirties. From 1880 to 1925 Scotland supported a large population of full-time professional painters, the bulk of them living in the west. It is not coincidence that the Glasgow School of Painting throve when Glasgow was the second biggest city in Britain and the main supplier of the world’s shipping. Dealers like Reid and Annan were not only exporting local painting to England and France, they were importing continental masterpieces for the collections of magnates like Cargill and Burrell. Scotland’s art schools and municipal galleries were built in this period, and built well. Things is nut whit they wur. In 1944 Sir William Burrell gave Glasgow Corporation the best private collection of French, German, Italian and oriental artifacts in Europe. The cost of housing this and employing a sufficient staff of administrators, conservators and security guards ensures that in the Scottish middle-west little public money will be spent on local painting for the foreseeable future. The Scottish dealers making a sure profit nowadays are handling paintings of the 1830-1925 period, mainly for the London market where not only Hornels and Laveries, but Houstons and Docherties have become sound investments. Annan’s lovely gallery in Sauchiehall Street became an army recruiting office in the sixties around the time that Upper Clyde Shipyards went into liquidation. The Scottish export of machines, coal and paintings has shrunk to a trickle.

  It is not flippant to couple the health of a nation’s art with the health of its bigger industries. The drop in the sale of newly made Scottish paintings since the start of the century is sometimes explained by saying that photography has ousted the portrait, that today’s homes are too small for big canvases, that modern art is so peculiar that only very sophisticated people like it. All these explanations are contained by the statement, “Most people can’t afford to buy paintings.” Quite true. Fine paintings always belong to rich private or public bodies, so the sales are happening where our prosperity moved to, near London. The number of commercial London galleries has multiplied by five or six since the start of the century. Prosperity is treating art as it treats other special skills, and drawing it south by feeding it best there.

  Now, when prosperity (which is called Capital in the Free West) sailed south in the thirties it left Scottish painters clinging to their art-schools like drowning seamen to rafts. It is strange to think how unimportant the Scottish schools were to earlier masters. At the turn of the century art teachers were few, often foreign, and most Royal Scottish Academicians and members of the Glasgow Institute had nothing to do with them. Nowadays the greatest part of those who exhibit in the Royal Scottish Academy and Royal Glasgow Institute are dominies. Three-quarters of our painters work in the time left from educating people, so the dominie is our most obvious kind of artistic life. This may be a pity. In the present state of money-sharing it is inevitable.

  I am sorry to spend so many words upon money when writing of an art-form. Nobody has more respect than the Scots for what can be measured by weight, volume and cash, but in softer moods we prefer to believe in the superior virtues of love, friendship, home, the church, a football team, the Orange Order and (if educated to it) Art. All the same, half the story of art is the story of who pays money for it. In Medieval days abbots and bishops hired stone-carvers and painters to do jobs as quickly as they hired weavers and builders, and a genius was one who did his work well enough to set a famous example. The city rulers of the Italian Renaissance spent new wealth raising and decorating public buildings with a competitive exuberance which our own rulers keep for weapon research: artists of extra skill and imagination were given marble and gold to work with, teams of assistants to direct, were bargained for by competing governments. Painting became an unstable industry when the rich stopped ordering art for their community and started wanting it mainly for themselves. They began searching for completed work by guaranteed, rock-bottom, gilt-edged geniuses, preferably dead ones who couldn’t spoil the market by flooding in new pictures. However, despite the instability of their profession nowadays, few painters kill themselves. Those who can neither live by painting nor bear to lose touch with it rarely put bullets into their skulls as Van Gogh did. In Scotland, as I said, they become dominies.

  Now, while it is possible for a good painter to teach (Klee, Kandinsky and Cowie did it) there occur, even in Scotland, painters who are unable to be anything else, and unless, like Joan Eardley, they have an unearned income, they need unusual toughness to survive. Modern artists’ early years are always a struggle because they are usually in their thirties before they have hammered out a mature style. But where Matisse, Braque, Bacon, Pollock finally matured their style there were galleries to show it and a public to buy. Where Angus Neil, Pierre Lavalle, Tom McDonald, Bet Low and Carole Gibbons matured their styles hardly anyone noticed. In public exhibitions their work was swamped by the products of the dominies, and there was no critical journalism to take note, no local dealer to persuade wealthy citizens or the municipal gallery that here was good new work. Moreover, exhibiting costs money which full-time painters can’t always afford, so they struggle to paint through thickening loneliness. They grow touchy with prosperous friends, resentful of the dominies, who can treat their touchiness as a joke.

  Unluckily this resentment is not the healthy distrust expressed between Scottish writers, a robust gregarious activity, a way of drawing attention to ourselves when we have nothing useful to say. The full-time painters’ resentment is isolating, self-hurtful, and can lead to that rigid despair which unintelligent doctors try to clear from the brain with electric currents. They become hermits, and nobody is to blame: not the art schools, the Arts Council, the R.S.A. or the Scottish public. The force which turns artists into teachers or hermits is the force which shut Denny’s shipyard in Dumbarton, which developed the hovercraft. As a friendly member of the Arts Council once said to John Connolly, the sculptor, “You must be mad to do this kind of thing in Scotland.” No no no no no! Not mad, just bloody unlucky. For in spite of the depressed state of local industry there are skilled workers among these part-timers and full-timers, these dominies and hermits. Why don’t they take their skill south if they’re any good? That’s what the best Scottish tradesmen and technicians do.

  Artists do go south of course, but if there is more talent in Scottish painting and writing than in our other professions it is because nowadays workers in imaginative industries take longer to teach themselves their jobs, and when they’ve done it they sometimes find they’ve made unbreakable connections with a few
houses and people, with a kind of life and kind of landscape. They have become natives.

  Alasdair Taylor is a native artist, a full-time painter, and something of a hermit.

  He was born in 1936 in the village of Edderton, Ross-Shire, where his father was station-master. His first profession was musical, for his mother was pianist in a small dance-band entertaining the Forces on leave, and at seven he began accompanying her on the drums. “When l felt tired they rolled me in a curtain at the side of the stage, I fell asleep and my father took over the drums. But he wasn’t much good.” In 1946 the family moved to Coalburn in Lanarkshire. He attended Larkhall Academy and Lesmahagow High School, grew keen on painting, but still drummed with small bands at balls and farmers’ weddings. And at Glasgow School of Art he played with a student jazz group. He was also in the Student Christian Movement, where a meeting with a Franciscan inspired him to visit a monastery in England with thoughts of becoming a monk.

  I mention this because Alasdair Taylor is a lyrical painter: a painter whose colour, like a musician’s sound, makes sombre and radiant feelings without showing (as many painters do and all good writers must) details of the social life causing them. Such an artist knows very well the feelings of hell, purgatory and heaven which were the material of religion before clergymen grew embarrassed by them. Alasdair Taylor rejected the Franciscans for the Presbyterian reason that he hated ritual. Since then he has experienced several religions and spiritualisms, but without desiring that fixed state of mind called belief. Belief in one system would put too narrow a box round his feelings.

  In the third art-school year he came to London to look at Rembrandt etchings, and visiting an almost empty cinema one afternoon saw a beautiful girl some rows ahead. He spoke to her. She was a Danish au pair girl. They met several times and became firm friends. She returned to Denmark. On leaving art school he received a £50 painting prize, sold his drums, used the money to follow her to Silkeborg, and they were married. I give these details to show his jazzman’s power: the power of acting spontaneously then building soundly on the result. Annelise is remarkable. She has calmness, strength, intelligence, and the love of painting not to nag her husband out of it when life is hard. She has prevented the usual despair and become the foundation of his art. One rare strong person who loves and supports your talent can outweigh a society which does not give a damn for you.

  They returned to Scotland. He taught art for three days in a Dumbarton school then handed in his notice and got work as a midden man with Glasgow Cleansing Department while Annelise bore their first daughter. Six months later the Church of Scotland minister of Glasgow University made him caretaker of the Chaplaincy Centre. It was a busy place but for nearly five years it gave him room, time and security to work, and it was here l first saw his paintings.

  He had two main sorts in that period, and the sort I preferred were the figures and portraits. The touches of pen and brush he used to show faces and bodies were amazingly free. An encounter with the Danish artist Asger Jorn had excited him to use paint richly and thickly. Rembrandt is said to have once painted a portrait so thick that, laid flat on the floor, it could be lifted by the nose. Sometimes Alasdair worked like that, building up the paint in jewel-like flakes. Yet he could still show whole characters and forms with a few quick nervous pen-strokes on paper. I was baffled and stunned by other works which art jargon might describe as abstract-expressionist-dadaism with bits of pop-collage. Their outraged energy that sometimes incorporated swear-words. Why?

  My answer is banal. Urban life, like the art of painting, is in a poor way. Commerce and government, always selfishly greedy, are now greedy in more versatile and quickly changing ways. In the prosperous sixties a work of popular sociology announced that modern happiness meant learning to accept, not only disposable furnishings, clothes, cars, but disposable1 homes, friendships, marriages. Painters are forced by their eccentric position to look hard at the life round about them, and their products show it. Some see the communal world reshaped by advertising and have made art out of commercial pornography, soupcan labels, popstar photographs. Some, excited by the impossibility of seeing exactly what our highly calculating technology is doing to us, have painted unsensual abstracts intricately calculated to stop the eye of the viewer focusing on them. Others, who feel the world at its best is a succession of exciting shocks, make works which are quaintly or vividly shocking, but have little other content.

  In England a recent group of painters called The Ruralists find modern their world so distasteful that they paint rural fairylands of little girls, flowers, rich country gardens, topiary lawns, parasols and Edwardian ballgames. But the two best-known British artists still paint modern people. Hockney makes his eye very cold and shows people as chalky-surfaced additions to modern furniture, bathroom fittings, swimming pools and glass-fronted banks. Bacon looks under the skin at our twisted loneliness and capacity for pain. And Alasdair Taylor, living in Glasgow, crucified an umbrella on a canvas and wrote swear-words under it, because his artistic gift was lyrical and nothing around him fed it.

  In 1965 the job of Chaplaincy caretaker ended and the Taylors moved to Northbank Cottage, a small farmhouse near the tip of the Hunterston promontory. Behind it rises a high red cliff with a strip of ancient tangled woodland at the foot. The front faces the Firth of Clyde across a narrow field usually given to potatoes, and the view embraces three islands: Millport (a seaside village under a serrated green hill) the Wee Cumbrae (rocky terraces of golden bracken and heather) and Arran (a blue-grey mountainous silhouette). The nearest building is the atomic power station, half a mile along the coast to the north and partly hidden by a bend in the cliff. To the south the clachan of Portencross is hidden by a fault-dyke with an opening cut in it to let the track through. The cottage has an outhouse with a skylight which was once the studio of the landscape painter Houston, but is now used to store seed-potatoes. Alasdair’s studio is in the main building, entered from a separate door at the back. The cottage, whitewashed and lit by oil-lamps, was the scene of a famous unsolved murder in the thirties. It has a plain, friendly feeling about it which is not purely why the Taylors moved there. The promontory is good farming ground, the landowners wanted an eye kept on the fields hidden by the cliff, so the cottage rent was a few shillings a week.

  When Alasdair left Glasgow many people thought he would soon return. He had poured out such streams of conversation in their company that they thought him a mainly social animal. They forgot he had grown up in mainly country districts, and that social animals spend hours together without talking at all. The drummer in Alasdair felt that company should be stimulated and stimulating, so his conversation was always very quick, intense, crammed with insights and therefore exhausting. It drew off energy he needed for work, work which was best fed by reflections in the country near the wife and daughters who loved him and took him for granted. On coming to Northbank he collected small boulders and driftwood from the beach, weathered roots from old trees by the cottage. The stones moved him to mark them with enamel hieroglyphs. He sculpted the wood into shapes suggested by its shape and grain. Wood, even flat slabs of it, can be got more cheaply than canvas, especially by a trained midden man, so his next paintings were on wood. Abstractions based on the life of Christ were painted on polished and varnished slices of a railway sleeper which was floated in by the tide. The colour had a richness he had once used mainly in portraiture.

  Later a friend brought down in a lorry some backdrops a theatre-group had thrown out, because they were a fire risk. Alasdair cut them down, stretched them, took them into Houston’s old studio, empty at the time. He now had nearly forty big canvases, each stained with blues, buffs, dull greens and pinks which had once, across the footlights, seemed like skies, trees and mountains. These shapes began to suggest pictures to him, as the tree-roots had suggested sculpture. Money was short; these were his first canvases for many years; he decided nothing must be wasted. He touched them only when feeling exactly what strokes of
colour to apply, working with brushes, oil colour and spray-paint cans. These cans are a popular medium with amateur muralists in the poorer parts of Glasgow, but cost nearly a pound each. Annelise, now working in an Ardrossan youth centre, bought more when she saw the supply run low. He left the choice of colours to her. He expected the canvases to last a year or two, but they were completed in a few weeks.

  This was the first work of his artistic maturity. The surfaces were as energetic as before but with new variety, depth and harmony. They hold many kinds of light and colour; light in cloud, water and leaves, colour in seaweed, pebbles, moss and rusty iron. Only the works themselves can show the coolness and warmth, nearness and remoteness they contain, but I have said enough to indicate that Alasdair Taylor is an abstract expressionist, one of the school containing most Kandinsky, much of Klee, all of Jackson Pollock, and in present-day England, Albert lrvin. This kind of painting, since it gives the beholder a shock which is not a shock of recognition, strikes most people as a chaos, a mere explosion of paint. Many abstract expressionist works strike me that way too. After a pleasurable shock at an obvious explosion of energy, many strike me as duller with each glance because they lack the variety of compostion, contrast and harmony which make a picture worth contemplating. But Alasdair’s pictures abide contemplation. The shock of seeing one as a whole, at a distance, becomes at close range a pleasure in those strongly, subtly varied colours which are a main part of my sensual, visual delight in the airy, watery, rocky and growing world outside his studio.

  From that time to this an abstract expressionist has lived and worked in a cottage on the Ayrshire coast, steadily painting, brooding, and painting again; sometimes visited by friends, a few of whom buy a picture from time to time; and partly unknown to, and partly ignored by, the official art world. For in Scotland, as elsewhere in Britain, a new official art world has come to exist, a separate one from art schools, institutes and academies.