Читать книгу A Life In Pictures - Alasdair Gray - Страница 10

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 from Tam O’Shanter. I chose the moment when Tam shouts, “Weel done, Cutty Sark!” The mass of naked witches are not “withered beldams, old and droll” as Burns describes them. I made them horribly plump, hoping their appearance would shock attractive girl students who had not noticed my existence. (This happened.) There is strained topographical truth in the road connecting Alloway’s “auld haunted kirk” with the brig over the Doon, and also the Burns memorial mausoleum in the park beyond it. I tried framing the scene between lightning flashes on the left reflecting ivy stalks on the right, though alas, the owl does not balance the flight of geese. I think the scene had enough cast shadows to please Miss Dick.

Tam O’Shanter , 1953, Indian ink and watercolour on paper

My oldest friend is George Swan. Like many Glaswegians he lived before marriage with his parents. Theirs was a one-room-and-kitchen flat in a four-storey tenement with three flats on each floor, shared lavatories on the communal stair. George’s dad, like mine, had fought in World War One. He had been a picture framer, then grew blind and worked on the production line of Singer’s sewing machine factory, Clydebank. This gentle, patient man sat for me at home with his back to the kitchen sink. The moonlit tower contains the central staircase of Duke Street Hospital in Dennistoun, seen from behind and long since demolished. The portrait was drawn with Indian ink on plywood, then tinted with enamel and oil glazes. I left some woodwork in the kitchen sink unit almost untouched, and only slightly darkened Mr Swan’s skin colour. I gave this portrait to the Swan family. It was returned to me with apologies because it made him look old and blind and his wife never thought of him like that. My home was a three-room-and-kitchen flat with a lavatory bathroom, but in my first Art School years I sometimes felt more at home in the Swans’ Dennistoun kitchen than in the living room of the Grays’ Riddrie home, perhaps because George’s home still had a mother. After his wife died Mr Swan lived in Fife with George and his daughter-in-law Rose. George, after working as a Glasgow engineer, had become an editor with the D.C. Thomson Press and his house is a fine bungalow in a middle-class garden suburb. Mr Swan, missing the noises of neighbours in a crowded old working-class tenement, said, “Every day sounds like Sunday here.”

Portrait of Mr George Swan at Home , 1952, ink, gouache, oil and varnish on wooden panel, 76 x 56 cm

I often made pictures with symmetrical frames in them, most clearly in this still life. The ornaments on our piano stool, the slippers beneath it, belonged to my sister, whose photograph is in the tortoiseshell frame. The pattern of our living-room carpet was not as bright as I painted it. In my first two Art School years Mora still attended Whitehill School, so was painted more than anybody else, since I was painting at home. When the given subject was musicians I showed her sitting on the stool, playing our upright piano. I lacked patience to paint the black notes but the sheet music on the floor, brass-topped table with still life in front, small square panes in the upper sash windows were in our living room, also the sofa with wooden arms – a bed settee where my parents and (latterly) father slept so that Mora and I had a bedroom each. The music teacher, cat, barometer, sacred heart picture, patterned cushions, curtains, carpet and wallpaper are invented or remembered from elsewhere. This picture was later damaged but I restored it in 2007, with improvements to the porch and view outside.

Still life with Green Slippers and Piano Stool , 1953, gouache on paper, restored with oil and acrylic 2006, 76 x 56 cm

One month in 1953 the subject was the self portrait on the frontispiece of this book facing the title page. This certainly used cast shadows, dramatizing my loneliness against a tenement in the Drygate. To this ancient district under the shadow of the Necropolis (now covered by Tennent’s Brewery) I added a section of the Monkland Canal that was nowhere near it. I envied cats for seeming at home anywhere and tried to join background to foreground with a line of them chasing each other. The original was in sheer black and white. In 2006 I added colours.

Of paintings lost from this time I most regret one on a biblical subject of our own choice. I painted a crucifixion with an emaciated Jesus being nailed by two modern British privates to a cross like a noticeboard. I mention it here because I used the same figure in my first mural painting discussed in chapter 7.

The Musicians , 1953, gouache and acrylic on paper, 56.5 x 88 cm

I cannot imagine how my art would have developed had the Art School let me paint subjects of my own choice. The general course was meant to prepare painters who would use oil colour if allowed, in their third year, to specialize in easel painting. Before then we had no training in oils. To plaster, wooden and canvas surfaces oil paint can be applied in clear glazes, even layers or thick as mud – Rembrandt’s Flayed Ox in Kelvingrove Museum was painted in all these ways – that only a very competent, confident teacher could demonstrate them. My own first attempts with oil paint kept giving me accidental colours I never intended, but so subtle and lovely that I spoiled my main idea by trying to include them. I gave oils up till years later, basing all my shapes upon firm drawing, chiefly using the mediums of Miss Irwin’s class and Whitehill School – opaque, fast-drying poster colour, mainly used in flat or patterned areas with distinct edges, sometimes drawn with a brush, or a detailed line drawing tinted with watercolour or inks. I never painted vague or indistinct things, and luckily in my second year I was at last allowed to draw what I had most wanted from Art School, living human bodies. I produced a large portfolio of life drawings of which all but six were later lost or stolen, but these six show the love of clear outline, and distrust of shadow that was too great to win our teachers’ approval.

Miss Dick regretted that my pencil drawings of naked or near naked people firmly outlined subcutaneous muscles and bones which she thought should be suggested by delicate shading which I never attempted, being incapable of it. Trevor Mackeson, a teacher I became friendly with, asked if I needed to make the people I drew look ugly and tortured. I said they didn’t look that way to me. Davie Donaldson was the best painter of the Art School’s staff. On overlooking me drawing from life one day he asked exactly what I was trying to do. I said I was trying to explain to myself the shape of the figure in front of me. “Really?” he asked. “Yes.” I answered. In a resigned way he said, “Ach well son, carry on, carry on.” At our monthly shows in the assembly hall a teacher would single out pictures as good or bad examples. Mine were never mentioned. Maybe my peculiar reputation was responsible.

Art School Life Drawings , 1953, pencil on paper, 42 x 30 cm

Life Class Interior: Student Model , circa 1955, gouache and ink on paper, 30 x 42 cm

The Art School shop was run by a pair of friendly widows, Mrs Mitchel and Mrs Cochrane. When I was their only customer one day one of them said, “Miss Dick says you’re a genius.” I felt bothered and unhappy. Both were watching me closely, then one asked, “What do you think of that?” I said, “Miss Dick does not know me well enough to judge.” If genius is known by work that others dare not call good or bad, then it is a damnable label to have attached. Most people, fellow students included, would make only two remarks about any picture of mine: “Very interesting”, then, after a thoughtful pause, “You certainly put a lot of work into it.”

Life Class Interior: Woman with Red Shawl , circa 1955, gouache and ink on paper, 30 x 42 cm

In the summer holidays most art students, especially those from working-class homes, enlarged their grants by taking a temporary job, but in 1953 Dad allowed me to stay at home to write my Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scot. With the plot complete in my head there was now enough material (I thought) to write the book quickly, but the first few sentences on paper proved that I lacked a decent prose style. Hitherto diaries and school essays had been filled by writing as I talked, pouring out thoughts as they sprang to mind, but a narrative in that gushing voice was not convincing. I struggled to make my words calm and unemotional, especially when describing emotional disturbance. I learned to use as few adjectives and adverbs as possible, and to not describe what people feel when their actions and words convey it. After two months I returned to Art School having managed to write only what finally became chapter 12, and the mad visions in 29. The book was growing and mingling with ideas for a modern Pilgrim’s Progress inspired by Kafka, as Edwin and Willa Muir interpreted him.

Nude at Red Table , 1954, ink and coloured papercollage, 61 x 32 cm

Reclining Nude , 1955, ink on paper, 61 x 32 cm

Nude on Chair , 1954, felt-tip pen and paper collage, 70 x 48 cm

Anatomy Museum Sketches , 1954, ink on paper, 30 x 21 cm

Mum’s death, and my alternating asthma and eczema bouts, left me fascinated and horrified by the structure of bones, nerves, veins, glands, muscular and connective tissues that amount to a human being. I felt the horror could best be overcome by understanding them as Leonardo and Michelangelo had done, by studying morbid anatomy. I asked Mr Barnes to help me apply to Glasgow University Medical department, for permission to sketch in their dissecting room, but I was only allowed to sketch pickled and bottled specimens in the department’s museum. I soon stopped doing so. Drawings like these gave too small an idea of how the living limb would work. The specimens that disturbed me were monstrous births like the cyclops and two-headed baby which may have been exhibits originally acquired by John or William Hunter, the 18th-century instigators of modern surgery who founded the university’s Hunterian Collections. They proved that the nature of things – which for me was how God worked – could give dreadful undeserved pain to innocent folk, pains that nuclear radiation and warfare would multiply.

The Artist in Wartime , 1954, poster, 76.5 x 51 cm

Student Poetry Reading 1 , 1955, poster, 51 x 76.5 cm

Student Poetry Reading 2 , 1955, poster, 76.5 x 51 cm

But I neared the end of my second Art School year on a friendly footing with most students and teachers I knew. Several girls enjoyed my company, despite my total failure to start a sexual romance with ones who attracted me. The Art School had no literary and debating society of the kind I had enjoyed at Whitehill, so I and Malcolm Hood started one. I sang in a choir run by a friend – performed in School concerts – had become a Recognized Character whose reputation (I heard later) was enhanced by many who thought I would die young. The State Bar in Holland Street, off Sauchiehall Street, was the School’s favourite pub when Glasgow pubs closed at 9 p.m., even at Hogmanay, supposed to be Scotland’s happiest festival and certainly the most drunken. Both my parents had celebrated it cheerfully but soberly. Around closing time on 31st December 1954 I left the State Bar and leant over the bonnet of a parked car feeling very sick and drunk. I was hailed by a small group leaving after me. They took me with them to parties in houses near the university I had never visited before or since. This was the best Hogmanay of my life; all later ones have been anticlimaxes. Bob Kitts was in the group, a London art student who had been invited north for the new year by Glasgow students he had met when on holiday in France. By talking and talking and talking with Bob I grew steadily sober.

His father had been a merchant seaman who, unlike mine, had suffered unemployment during the Depression, but later worked as a driver for the GPO. World War Two had changed life for the Kitts as much as the Grays. The parents stayed in London while Bob, his two brothers and sister were evacuated to Cornwall, separated and billeted with strangers. As often happened, young Bob was with people who treated him badly until his strong-minded mother found out. She took him away and placed him with a kindly family he remembered fondly. During the London Blitz the father and mother were bombed out, so after the war the family were reunited in a completely different home, but resumed the Cockney tradition of summer holidays in the farms of Kent, earning money by hop-picking and sleeping in tents after sing-songs round a camp fire. Until 1960 every fit young British male had to serve two years in the armed forces. I (luckily) was unfit, but Bob had served two years in Henlow RAF base. This allowed him to attend night school classes and make a portfolio of work that had got the Slade Art School to accept him as a student. His fees and living expenses were, like mine, paid by the new Welfare State so we were both Socialists – Bob said his family never had anything to Conserve. We were both fascinated by the visual arts, loved the writings of Dylan Thomas and Scott Fitzgerald, and were writing a semi-autobiographical novel inspired by Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. While discussing time and space in image and word one of us said, “The only logical outcome of our interest in word and image is filming,” and the other agreed. We arranged to meet again as soon as possible and correspond with each other in future. On the night we met, Bob also met a Glasgow girl, Hilary Leeming, then a domestic science student. I came to enjoy a relaxed, platonic friendship with her that I later enjoyed more than once with the lovers of friends.

Drawing of Robert Kitts , 1955, ink on paper, 30 x 21 cm

Hilary Leeming , 1959, ink on paper, 30 x 21 cm

Portrait of Bob , 1958, ballpoint pen on paper, 30 x 21 cm

In the 1954 summer holiday I took part in an Art School visit by bus, ferry and train to Florence, Rome and Venice. Dad was then a site clerk at Arden, south Glasgow, where one of the new housing schemes that came to surround the city was being built. To pay for the trip he got me work as a joiner’s labourer and, during the Glasgow Fair Fortnight, as a day watchman. I made several sketches to help me make one of those large, complex, realistic compositions I have hardly ever had time to complete. I was also planning a picture for an Art School competition with a small money prize for the winner. The given subject was The Marriage Feast at Cana where Christ did his first miracle before his mother and disciples – six fishermen, a doctor, lawyer, tax collector, artist, handsome young lad and the accountant, Judas. In Italy I looked for faces illustrating this social and psychological range and found some among sculpture in Italian museums, where the pictures I mostly enjoyed were small early tempera paintings in clear bright colours and labelled Primitive. Beside them the wild dramatic gestures and swirling drapery of big high Renaissance oil paintings seemed very dull, though I now know they were seen through brown layers of varnish that restorers would soon start to remove. But these richly dressed folk had obviously been painted to satisfy equally rich patrons, which was why Blake had detested such art, and why Ruskin had thought art from before Raphael’s time set better examples. St Peter’s, Rome, perplexed my working-class soul with its preposterously expensive efforts to impress. I thought the holy water holders unintentionally 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.