I told James Campbell that any preliminary sketch I did of the mural would mislead him, because my first design would undergo many changes during the painting. I suggested he pay me a small sum in advance for my materials and food while I did the job, on the understanding that if he disliked the final result he could paint it out and pay no more. He shook my hand on that. I travelled by train to Lanark, which is a 15 minute walk from Kirkfield Bank, and in the 3 or 4 weeks of work on the painting slept on a platform above the bar of the lounge that was being constructed. The mural was completed to Mr. Campbell’s satisfaction.
This is my largest painting of a landscape mainly natural, as buildings and fields are not the main features. It shows the Clyde coming from behind Tinto, the highest hill in southwest Lanarkshire, and departing to the northwest down the valley past New Lanark, behind the high ground where the old town of Lanark stands. To distort all this as little as possible I manipulated the perspective to show both the two greatest falls and the nearly two miles of gorge between them.
In 2008 The Tavern was bought by Andy Boyle, pub owner in Hamilton, who set out to give it a new look while making it a pub that would serve first-class meals. He discovered my mural by stripping off layers of paper and paint put over it by several previous owners, and liked it – even though the colours were much faded and the surface had been pierced by fixings for wall lights. At one end water penetration had ruined an area 2 1/2 feet by 4 which had been replastered. A picture restorer called in to advise recognised the work as mine and suggested I restore it, which I did with the help of two assitants: Richard Todd and Robert Salmon. No photograph of the whole original existed and too few early sketches for it, so I chiefly relied on memory and new photographs of the landscape when restoring obliterated parts. Perhaps forty years of subsequent painting let me improve on what I first did. If not, I believe it is no worse. Andy Boyle opened the former Tavern as The Riverside Restaurant in 2008. It closed in 2009 because each of three excellent young chefs he successively employed went to better paid jobs in posh hotels. In 2013 the building is still for sale.
It is not just vanity that makes me wish it were opened again as an inn at the very least. Kirkfield Bank still has a primary school where children meet, and a small general store where housewives and husbands encounter each other. There may even still be a Kirk in Kirkfield Bank. But a village lacking a pub where adults can casually meet to enjoy the company of others singly or in groups is a community losing its soul and on the way to become a commuters housing estate. The old Tavern was a lively social centre, whether my mural was a visible part of the interior or not. I hope, for Kirkfield Bank’s sake, it becomes one again.
Hillhead Subway Station Mural*
THIS WALL DECORATION IS THE result of many people working together, but the main artists are Nichol Wheatley and me. So first a few words about us both, starting with the oldest.
I graduated in mural painting from Glasgow School of Art in 1957 and have since painted twelve big interior walls or ceilings, two in a Church of Scotland and Synagogue that were later demolished. Three were papered over by new owners of the buildings, but in two cases newer owners still took the paper off and I restored them. Between these jobs I often worked as a writer. It is hard in Scotland to earn a living by picture making, so many such artists work as teachers.
Nichol Wheatley is thirty-five years younger than me. He too attended Glasgow School of Art and, unwilling to teach, became a bouncer in a pub, an organizer of pub bouncers, then a blacksmith. He took to mural painting in 1999. His first commission was decorating the Grosvenor Café, Ashton Lane, when I worked on the other side, in the Ubiquitous Chip restaurant, restoring and enlarging my mural on the stairs to the lavatories. On one cafe wall Nichol painted a panoramic view of Hillhead showing both sides of Byres Road between Kelvingrove Park and the Botanic Gardens. This disappeared when the Grosvenor café became the Vodka Wodka bar two years later, but Nichol’s talent and practical skill soon won him other, larger mural commissions. He restored the decorations and paintwork of St Aloysius Church, made wall paintings for hotels in Glasgow, England and abroad, and made the mosaic floor of the Ingram Street Corinthian restaurant.
We became colleagues in 2005 when, having painted the ceiling and gallery of the Òran Mór auditorium, I needed help to put a decorative dado, mirrors and frieze on lower walls. Nichol’s firm now had employees he had trained to do all kinds of mural work, and together he and they supplied exactly what I wanted. I have a plan to decorate other, higher auditorium walls which Colin Beattie, the Òran Mór’s creator and owner, approved of. He and I thought completing it would take years. Nichol has suggested how to tackle it in ways that will reduce the time to one or two years only. That is still in the future.
The general public has so far not noticed the incompleteness of the Òran Mór decorations, which are the most popular I have painted, and perhaps why in 2010 Strathclyde Partnership for Transport suggested I decorate the long wall in the Hillhead station vestibule, the first of the Subway stations they are modernizing. SPT approached me through Nichol because he had worked with me, and perhaps to ensure I would complete the job by a fixed date. Artists like me find it hard to do this with large works of art, as we cannot foresee new ideas for improvements that will extend the work, breaking deadlines some employers take seriously. If SPT thought Nichol’s practical help would speed things they were right. Without him it might have been finished in 2014.
The wall size is 2.105 by 12.610 metres – nearly seven feet high and nearly six times as wide. Folk going through the turnstiles faced the left side, those coming up the stair and escalator the right. Opposite the escalator the wall bends slightly outward in an area exactly filled (allowing for the grouting) by the same size of porcelain tiles that now line other walls of the renovated station – seven rows of three, 60 by 30 centimetres. By balancing this with an equal tile area at the turnstile end I shortened the centre of the mural to about twenty-nine feet by seven, and decided to fill it with a view of Hillhead, for three reasons:
1. The station is in the centre of Hillhead, which I know well. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, the old BBC building with Botanic Gardens had been among my favourite places since the age of eleven. I had lived and worked in the district since 1968, would enjoy depicting it, so others might enjoy the sight of it.
2. It would be in a tradition of civic art that once flourished in several Italian city states, especially Sienna between the 14th and 16th Century, where public buildings are still decorated with views of how the city looked in its centuries of independent municipal government.
3. In 2007 I had illustrated a novel, Old Men In Love, with a view of Hillhead, mainly copied from a photograph of Nichol Wheatley’s mural in the former Grosvenor Café.
Enlarging the illustration to make my own mural seemed so easy that I thought that with the help of one assistant, six weeks work would produce for SPT a large scale cartoon of the final mural. In his Maryhill workshop Nichol gave me ample studio space, and with the help of three assistants I produced a convincing sketch in three months. But no good big painting is just a smaller one enlarged – mere enlargement destroys its vitality. Nichol built a table whose top was the area of the cityscape, and here were joined together detailed drawings of all the buildings. They were drawn from sketches and close-up photographs, integrated with help of aerial surveys and maps. Traditional perspective would make this impossible. Four facades of the multi-storey Boyd Orr building appear together, though nobody at one time could see more than two. Also its roofline is seen from far below while behind it Glasgow University library (a higher multi-storey being on top of a hill) is seen from above. In the language of art this is a Cubist view, like Picasso portraits where one eye is shown full-face beside a nose in profile, and other features shown as the artist thought most typical. He was certainly influenced by Egyptian figure painting in which the head and legs are shown in profile, the eye and torso full-face. That is why exciseman
Rousseau said, “You and I are the greatest painters in France, Monsieur Picasso, you in the Egyptian style, I in the Modern.” – which proves the exciseman was not a naïve intellectual. Picasso’s Cubism shocked many before adopted by cartoonists. Mickey Mouse’s two circular ears were always seen from in front however he turned his head. The artist who drew Dennis the Menace and his dog Gnasher (unlike Dudley Watkins who drew Oor Wullie) also showed features with Cubist twists. My several viewpoints are not combined in faces, only in buildings, so will not appear so surprising.
The architectural drawing was in place before the end of 2011. Leaving them to be coloured digitally at a later stage I painted the sky, streets, trees and parks, and then left the job to Nichol. Painted surfaces in an entrance hall will be damaged by change of temperature and deliberate or accidental vandalism, so he had to turn my design into something more durable. Romans and Byzantines made mural pictures with mosaic tiles a quarter inch square. Arabian murals were of larger tiles – square, triangular and other straight-sided shapes arranged in brilliantly coloured patterns. My design was mostly blocks of buildings. I asked if each main block could be cut from a single tile, as large as possible, so that the different shapes of each would fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. I did not know I was asking for something that had never been made before. Nichol knew that, and believed he could find a way to do it. European laws required the ceramic work to be advertised for tender. Two major firms applied, said they could only work in tiles of one size, so SPT gave Nichol the job.
He first cut the paper design into sections scanned onto a computer where they were digitally joined again on screen. A helper examined each detail and erased all accidental marks. On Nichol’s laptop he and I put colours into the black and white architecture, and he ordered specimen tiles from three firms, one of them Spanish. The colours they printed on these specimens were not clear enough and proved he should fire the design onto tiles from transfers. FotoCeramic from Stoke-on-Trent made the individual transfers. Cosmo Ceramics south of the Clyde are providing all other tiles for the SPT station walls. From their biggest sheets of porcelain Nichol jet-cut each jigsaw section, found the right chemistry for applying the colour transfers, and oversaw the colours fired onto each tile with Susan O’Byrne and Emilka Radlinska of Glasgow’s Ceramic Studios. Every stage needed trials, errors and losses that could not be foreseen. One in ten tiles were damaged in the firing and done again. Some were done again because what I asked for did not please me. Working overnight from 10pm to 5am, Nichol and his helpers installed these tiles, with the rainbow and glimpses of the Kelvin done in traditional mosaic. The work was finished on Monday morning, 25th of June 2012, six weeks before the station renovation was complete.
The panels at each end of the mural wall – seven rows, three tiles wide – contain symbols of people and some creatures found in most cities, with the words ALL KINDS OF FOLK and FOLK OF ALL KINDS, and on the left side, the names of all the artists who made the job possible. The symbols are mostly adapted from my book illustrations with a few invented for the mural. There is a sunny sky on the left with white clouds darkening to stormy ones in the centre and ending in a night sky above Kelvingrove, where a tablet floats with the inscription HILLHEAD 2011 when the architecture was mainly drawn. Already this view is slightly out-of-date – trees shown in the grounds of the Òran Mór were destroyed in a recent storm. Sky apart, this Hillhead has empty streets because filling them with the usual flow of people and cars would have made them disturbingly busy and needed months of extra work. To show realistically (not symbolically) some people nowadays there are portraits of five people, too few to suggest a cross-section of our society but enough to indicate different ends of it. At the left are three still often seen at this end of Byres Road – Allan Richardson, painter, etcher and street cleaner; Maria, Big Issue seller; and Muslim (seated) a flower seller shown without his flowers. At the Kelvingrove end are two elected politicians with Hillhead connections, and I avoid party propaganda by not giving their names. One is a member of the SPT committee which commissioned the mural.
A few small parts of it could be improved if Nichol and I remade them together, but I am as happy with the whole thing now as I have been with most of my big jobs.
* Written when the publicity officer of Strathclyde Partnership for Transport asked for “A rationale for the Hillhead Mural”, meaning, why had I decorated a main subway station with these pictures. The decorated wall was uncovered for the public in 2012.
Of John Connolly*
JOHN CONNOLLY HAD AN unusually tough life. At the age of eleven his working-class parents were killed in the bombing of Clydebank. After five years in an orphanage boarding school he was apprenticed as an electrician, did two years of national service and in 1952 had his first piece of good luck when he met and married Janice, a cheerful and supportive wife. From 1953-59 he underwent prolonged treatment of tuberculosis which required the removal of a lung. In convalescent periods he discovered himself as an artist, practicing embroidery and painting.
From the late 1950s onward he and Janice lived in Maryhill, northwest Glasgow, where she bore him 4 children, their second son Dennis died when a baby of meningitis. John worked as an engineer with Duncan Low ltd. who made electrical heaters. This gave him access to a welding shop and much scrap metal, letting him make metal sculptures in his free time. He made more than there was space to store in the family’s three room council flat. Luckily it was on the tenement’s ground floor. Being a skilled handyman in any material, John cut a trapdoor in the floor of the lobby cupboard, thus gaining access to the building’s damp course, a large 4 foot high cellar. By this time he had artist friends who appreciated his work. Into that cellar they escorted others to view his larger and heavier works on their knees and by the light of an electric torch. One of them was a Scottish Arts Council official who obtained for John his first major commission, the welded sculpture Embracing Couple for Strathclyde University.
Nowadays a few painters and sculptors in Scotland make a living solely by their art. In the 20th century that was almost impossible if the artist did not go to London. Artists without inherited money almost always subsidised their art by other work, usually teaching. John took seasoned part-time employment as a lecturer in art appreciation for Glasgow University Extra Mural department, became a training officer with the Scottish Epileptic Association, but worsening health made it essential for him to get paying work he could do at home in his own time. He retrained as a watch and clock mender, left Glasgow for Arran in 1972, and from then onward lived and worked as one in his McKelvie Road bungalow in Lamlash. Many in Arran will also remember his wife Janice, who worked as an assistant in the pharmacy. She died in 2008, her funeral service being held in Lamlash Church of Scotland. John’s funeral was held on 23 April 2012.
John’s first one-man exhibition of work was in 1962 at the Glasgow University Chaplaincy Centre. In 1986 he took a studio in Brodick to make portrait heads exhibited in the Royal Scottish Academy. In the period between he exhibited in Hopetoun House, the Carnegie Trust Dunfermline, the Demarco Gallery Edinburgh, the North Britain Gallery Gartocharn, also with the Regent Gallery and the Glasgow Group in the McLellan Gallery. Along with the welded sculpture his portrait heads were in ciment fondu though a late Scottish Arts Council grant enabled him to work in bronze. His last exhibition was held by his friend Vicki Hudson in her Lochranza gallery, where at present some of his work is still on show, including the bronze portrait head of Ricki Demarco he also exhibited in the Main Gallery, Brodick. Most of his works are in storage.
It is common for Scottish artists to be mainly unknown on their homeland, if they have no talent for self-publicity. John was a quiet man, mainly brought to public attention by painters and sculptors of his own age who had met him in Glasgow and loved his work. Most of these, like George Wylie and me, became widely noticed as artists quite recently. The work of some fine artists is only widely noticed after their death. John Connolly’s work
deserves to be. He is survived by his son Ian, his daughters Annette and Elizabeth.
* John Connolly was one of several Scottish workers in the visual arts who became close friends of mine in the 1960s, gained a number of showings in small west Scottish galleries, sometimes with Scottish Arts Council support, but never earned enough by their art to support their families by it.
Of Me and Others Page 37