A Mouse at Kelvingrove - Esther

Poor Things book cover

Latterly, there were regular rumours of artist & author Alasdair Gray’s near-demise. After all, when one is an eighty-something known to frequent Òran Mór, a small problem can become a big deal. One serious accident certainly did occur & some other stories may or may not have been true. Yet when he did depart in the dying days of 2019 it was still a nasty shock. It felt as if a protective ceiling had been pulled away – such a giant of creativity & imagination with sound political principles in Scotland is a treasure to be cherished. Revered even. Writers such as Irvine Welsh, Val McDermid & Ian Rankin quickly paid tribute to his gifts & impact.

Alasdair’s Lanark remains his epic literary masterpiece, wild, ambitious & eventually receiving some of the acclaim it deserved. It’s also horrible & self-pitying & therefore all the more honest & human. His books were all well worth reading & I was impressed by their candid spirit

BUT

I was much more interested in the covers. For not only was he one of the modern greats of Scottish literature, said literature was parcelled in his own artwork. You’d pull off the dust-jacket & thrillingly there would be more & different images or text on the book cover. I love this kind of thing, this attention to detail whilst considering the whole. His illustrations were part of the books, inseparable in mind & in reality. 

I first came across him in pre-internet days, buying postcards of art I liked on sight. I didn’t have to have seen the artwork itself, but I would learn a lot getting postcards. Just trusting my eyes & visual taste got me this far. My method: Look, Like, Learn. A couple of Alasdair’s portraits lured me in this way.

& I was so glad they did - quality of line such as his comes only from hours into days into weeks into months of practise, relentless drawing, developing his eye & craft until the eye & hand work as one. It is a joy to find – his hand seems so free, so loose yet it belies the discipline & hard work required over decades to achieve it.

Postcard: portrait of poet Liz Lochead

As a man he was often portrayed as a bit ridiculous. People say he was “colourful,” “a one-off” & worst of all "a character." Many people will tell you a story of meeting him. When they do, they frequently do an impression of his voice or his movements. They might raise their hands in the air, their voices may go a couple of octaves higher & they Scottish-up their accent. Alasdair would say things like his methods were “so old-fashioned” that these days he was “almost considered avant-garde.” Or that he believed he was “an interesting second-rater…which is better than being a third-rater.” When publishers released an edition of The Fall of Kelvin Walker with a cheesy cover picture (that was not his) of a couple locked in a kiss, he squealed, “Nothing like this ever happens in the book!”

Alasdair Gray: by himself & replete with tippex

When I met him, it was at a book reading. We had several bookshops in Aberdeen in the 1990s. One of the larger companies had two stores with black walls & furnishings creating an oddly comforting cocoon-like atmosphere & ideal for an Alasdair Gray reading. He half-shuffled, half-slouched towards the table, dishevelled & appearing not to see very much. Apparently bemused, he looked up at the assembled group waiting to hear from him. Barely anyone seemed to realise it was him (pre-internet) but I’d seen photos of him in newspaper articles. 

Treasure

This image of him as a bumbling shambles of a man was one thing, but his sharp wit & extremely creepy, often peculiar writing & art was the real deal. This to me was a man happy to luxuriate in anonymity & the wider world’s belief that he didn’t have a clue what was going on. No-one could produce what he did without being well-read, intelligent & astute. & weird. Very weird. His small but beady eyes behind thick glasses were busy dissecting the world & his inner life, handing it over to you tormented & bleeding.

Book cover thrills: A Life in Pictures & Lanark

In 2014, perhaps mindful of the aforementioned rumours & ostensibly to celebrate his 80^th birthday, Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery exhibited a retrospective of a range of around a hundred of Alasdair’s works. This show included portraits, information about his various murals across the city & works commissioned for his position as City Recorder in the late 1970s. Kelvingrove’s major temporary exhibitions take place in a basement floor. Once there, you get the impression there are perhaps more works than there really are. The event was a brilliant chance to see much of the work I’d only seen in books & articles, not to mention postcards.

May in Black Dress on Armchair

As breath-taking as it was to see these works physically & up close there were aspects of them that summed up an apparently defiant nature. Despite the quality of line, accomplishment in composition & beauty of the individual pieces, his approach to media & supplies seemed fairly careless. Many of his drawings & paintings were rendered on brown wrapping paper: cheap, smooth & possible to buy in rolls. Works could be as large as was required. Convenience & practicality appeared to have been a major factor in selecting materials. Sections of a drawing might be cut out & stuck onto card or board & until I saw them in detail, I hadn’t realised how much tippex he used. Yes, tippex. Accessible though this might have been, it seemed sloppy enough on white paper but downright anarchic on brown…

Who cares if you've forgotten to leave space for their heads? Just draw over the top!

One feature of the Kelvingrove show was a film in which he was interviewed, people spoke about him & his work & how generally great & unique he was. You could sit on wooden benches to watch it & this was the one place you were left aware of where you were – underground.

As my partner & I sat watching the film, we couldn’t be sure who – if anyone – saw what else we saw. A mouse: scuttling, not particularly hurrying across the floor in front of the screen, rather bewildered without being so flustered he couldn’t function. Not being an apex predator, he’d have had his wits about him. I swear, if it had been announced that Alasdair Gray had died that day, I’d have been an instant believer in reincarnation.

This short clip features Alasdair, his voice, his “font,” his friend & poet Liz Lochead – she talks quite eloquently about the link between his writing & his visual art:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbNXMBvj3ew&frags=pl%2Cwn

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