Letter to Thirsty Lunch Director

Dear Peter Burnett,
                Thanks for your letter of June 29th, about the reading of Goodbye Jimmy arranged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe on 13th August. I was given it yesterday, hence this delayed reply.

Will you tell Andi Ross that I have two requests about the reading of Goodbye Jimmy he is arranging?

Please, Mr Ross, use the script I have revised and improved up to 10th July, which can be found on http://alasdairgray.blogspot.com.

And please announce before a reading that: Dave McLennan of the A PLAY, A PIE, A PINT lunchtime theatre will be producing it at the Oran Mor leisure centre, Glasgow, in October this year. The director will be Liz Lochhead if she is free at the time, the author, if she is not. – When I told Dave McLennan I had announced this play on my blog as free for all who wanted it, he asked me to prevent productions before his own. My blog announces this, but I think it need not apply to readings.  

Yours truly, Alasdair Gray

ALASDAIR TAYLOR, PAINTER: TRAVELLING EXHIBITION 2007-2009

Dear Exhibition Officer,
You may not know of Alasdair Taylor, the Scottish painter who graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1959. It is impossible nowadays – especially in Scotland – for an artist’s work to become very well-known, if it is not promoted by a well-known dealer: in which case the work may reach important exhibitions. It is hard for curators and exhibition officers to take seriously an elderly artist whose name does not come up on a website. This can, however, lead to the neglect of good work.

Alasdair Taylor passed most of his working life in hermit-like seclusion, at an isolated cottage by Portencross, on the Clyde Firth, so his work is known to only a few. It is joyfully or mysteriously Abstract Expressionist, a school of painting that only those devoted to Installation Art will dismiss. His figure drawings and portraits are also beautiful and vigorous. His range is indicated in the catalogue for his last big retrospective exhibition. For a fortnight, December 1986, it was in Glasgow McLellan Galleries, went to the Talbot Rice, Edinburgh in 1987, and thence Aberdeen Municipal Art Galleries. This and some small private shows led to some work in private collections but none in major galleries.

In 2005 a stroke left Alasdair helpless and wheelchair-bound in a Largs nursing home. His many unsold paintings and sculptures are now safely stored by his daughter, Jean Complaisson in Lochwinnoch. With her help the following people are publicising it in a new, larger retrospective exhibition show of his work, opening in Irvine, 2007.
Malcolm Dickson and Euan Sutherland of Streetlevel Photoworks, 48 King Street, Glasgow G1 5QP. (Note: The Scottish Arts Council have given Dickson and Sutherland a grant to digitally scan and catalogue all of Alasdair Taylor’s work, which they have largely done.)
John Gray, North Ayrshire Council Exhibitions Officer.
Norma McCrone and Jo Leviston of North Ayrshire Council’s Arts and Education
James Kelman and me, authors, who like and own Alasdair Taylor’s painting and sculptures. (These two may be useful in helping to publicise exhibitions of it.)

The first show will also be first to open the new, enlarged Harbour Arts Centre Gallery, Irvine and will run from June to September in 2007, if the new building is complete as scheduled. Otherwise, it will be a few weeks later. If you want more information, please contact Malcolm Dickson, malcolm [at] streetlevelphotoworks.org.

Yours truly, Alasdair Gray

MISS JEAN IRWIN'S ART CLASS AT KELVINGROVE

Dear Hamish,
              I cannot just now tell you more about my memories of your Great Aunt Jean Irwin, because for the rest of 2006 I will be arranging them, with others, for a book called A Life in Pictures, where I hope you will read. She was kind and generous and we were friends to the end of her life. I visited her in the Helensburgh nursing home where she died, and we had a happy chat in which, on four different occasions, she asked, “How’s Andrew doing?” – Andrew being my son. Each time I told her he was happily married with a daughter in the U.S.A. The fifth time she asked, “How’s Andrew doing? Or have I asked you that already?” “Four times already, Jean,” I told her, at which she laughed cheerfully and said, “There it is – memory gone – nothing to be done about it at my age.” She had not become a miserable, mindless old soul and was still good company.
     I heard (but forget from who) that Jean had relations in Melbourne who possessed slides of paintings made by children in her class, and at least one was by me when I was fifteen or sixteen – a sinister night street scene, in guache, showing a group of people standing under the most common kind of Glasgow gas lamp post in those days, with the lantern only just out of a tall man’s reach, with a cross-piece on which a lamp-lighter could lean the top of his ladder. My picture had a small Jesus crucified on that cross-piece. I would dearly like to get a good digital scan of that slide for use in my Life in Pictures. Could you give me information that would help toward this?

     Yours truly, Alasdair Gray    
     

ORAN MOR LEISURE CENTRE

ORAN MOR LEISURE CENTRE

In 2003 Colin Beattie, Glasgow publican and property developer, bought the former Kelvinside (Botanic Gardens) Parish Church building, which had stood derelict for several years and began turning it into a leisure centre called Oran Mor – Gaelic for Great Music. The basement, entered from Great Western Road, became a night club, also used during the day as theatre for the popular A Play, A Pie, A Pint company. The middle floor became the Oran Mor pub and restaurant. The main body of the kirk upstairs became an auditorium used for concerts, conferences, weddings and other large functions.

     Colin Beattie commissioned me to decorate this auditorium. With the help of two assistants, Robert Salmon and Richard Todd, I completed painting the ceiling with a night sky and Zodiac constellations before the building opened to the public. Four or five years will pass before the whole job is done. The eastern gable with fine stained-glass lancet windows has two rainbows on it. The side-walls of the auditorium gallery, with views of Glasgow University, Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Park Circus and statuary groups on Kelvin Way bridge are also incomplete.

An ambitious scheme of painting from the auditorium floor upwards has begun with the help of Nichol Wheatley’s interior decoration firm, Perfect Circle Art. Under a surrounding dado the walls have been painted red with stencilled gold thistles, roses, leeks and harps on top. The walls above the dado are about to be painted like three colours of marble supporting an inlaid frieze based on Celtic designs. The walls will also have another ambitious feature.  

PORTRAITS FOR AUDITORIUM WALLS

Above the dados in the auditorium, 34 mirrors with rounded tops will contain portraits heads of people who created and used this building from 1862 to the present day. There will usually be three heads looking out of each mirror, sometimes four. All but four mirrors (at the Byres Road end of the south side-aisle wall) are arranged in couples.  

FOUR MIRRORS, BAR AREA, EXIT ON GREAT WESTERN ROAD SIDE

First mirror on the north wall: Colin Beattie, purchaser and present owner of the building; George Swanson, his partner in many laborious and intricate negotiations to get planning permission; Peter McGurn, architect whose designs were used to convert Kelvinside (Botanic Gardens) Parish Church into a leisure centre.

Second mirror: Claire Kinna and Iain McArthur of Surface Interior Decorators Ltd; Ronnie Bridges, general floor manager.

Two mirrors on the south wall: Colin Beattie’s longest-standing officers – Sandie first accountant; Cheryl Beattie his clerk and receptionist, and four others.

TWO MIRRORS, BAR AREA, SOUTH SIDE

These mirrors will show Dave McLennan, producer of the popular A Play, A Pie, A Pint lunch hour theatre, with some authors of plays he has produced – Peter McDougall, Liz Lochhead, William McIlvanney, Louise Welsh, John Bett.  

FIFTEEN MIRRORS, NORTH AISLE WALL FROM BYRES ROAD END

These mirrors will show in chronological order heads of those associated with the building when it was Kelvinside (Botanic Gardens) Parish Church, which opened in 1862. The first three mirrors are side by side, the rest in couples.

1: The founders – The publishers John Blackie Senior; W. G. Blackie; John Blackie Junior. These held the first meeting to organise the church and raise the money.

2: Mr Thomas Corbett (father of the first Lord Rowallan) who bought ground for the church, the architect, J.J. Stevenson; and one other (still to be decided).

3: Lord and Lady Overtoun who donated money, he being a millionaire, strong churchman (he paid for the former YMCA building on Bothwell Street) also exploiter of employees in his Glasgow East End factories. For this Keir Hardy, leader of the British Labour Party and its first M. P., denounced him as a “a whited sepulchre”. Behind him I would show The Clincher, nickname of radical contemporary who published his own newspaper. I would show him holding up for inspection the edition he brought out after Overtoun’s death with the headline: Consternation in Heaven! Lord Overtoun Fails to Arrive.    

4: Two founders and the first minister – Montgomerie & Fleming, kirk elders or deacons and owners of a Glasgow business named from them; also the Reverend William Traill M.A. 1862-67.

5: The three later ministers of Kelvinside Parish Church – Rev. Walter Ross Taylor D.D. 1868-1907; Rev. P.D. Thomson M.A., D.D. 1907-38. Rev. Alan Boyd Robson M.A. 1938-78.

6: Former members of the congregation – Robert Service, popular poet who attended when a schoolboy; Donald Morrison, an elder and also Rector of Glasgow Academy; a rector (not yet chosen) of Kelvinside Academy which was also served by the church.

7: William Nicholl, a popular commander of first Parish Church Boys’ Brigade; Willie Naismith, kirk elder, mountaineer and balloonist who died in the 1930s; Mr Nicol Paton Brown who donated a carillon of eight bells in the church tower in memory of men in the congregation who died in the First World War. (The bells were rung for the first time on Christmas Day, 1917.)

8 and 9: These should contain heads of congregation members killed in the 1914-18 war. I need help in finding photographs of these usually very young men. Their names and ranks are on a marble memorial in what was the parish church’s front porch. Being unsuitable to what is now a main entrance to the Oran Mor pub, it is now behind a plaster surface on which rampant bag-pipe-playing lions are painted. Anyone who has photographs of a grandparent or granduncle named on this memorial should contact us.  

10 and 11: Heads of congregation members who died in the Second World War, whose names are also on the above memorial. We welcome help in finding these.

12: Portraits of living members of the former Kelvinside Parish Church congregation who now attend Kelvinside-Hillhead Parish Church in Observatory Road. Irene Allison who attended from the age of 3 and sang in the choir; Sandy Russell christened; Mona Ferguson who played piano for the Sunday School.

13: Irene Calder, christened there and went on to lead the Primary Sunday School; Margaret Kay, also led the Primary Sunday School; John Allison who sang in the choir and was, for many years, Santa Claus.

14: Two other former church members plus the retired Professor of Astronomy, Archie Roy, who played the organ for the last minister’s services of healing.

15: Three heads of those connected with the Bible College for which the church was used from 1978-199?

THIRTEEN MIRRORS, SOUTH AISLE WALL FROM BYRES ROAD END

These will show workers who converted the former church into the Oran Mor in 2003. Each workman was photographed at the time by Kevin Cameron, who is filming the whole Oran Mor-making business. The first mirror on the right of a window is the only single mirror.  

1: Bill Cairney, site manager; David Cairney, site foreman; Bob Adam – foreman
    joiner; James Docherty, security.

2: 4 labourers – Willie Buck; Jack Connolly; Alex MacKay; William Stevenson.  

3: 3 electricians – Jason McGlynn; Craig Campbell; Raymond Montgomery.

4: 4 joiners – Phil Rudden; Alex Morris; William Agnew; Mitchell Johnstone.

5: 3 plasterers – Kevin Jardin; Andy Clark; John Clark.
    
6: 4 floor-layers – Sam McLaren; Nick Marsh; Stephen Cunningham; Paul Marshall.

7: 1 drinks dispenser engineer –John Hogg; 2 stone-masons – Ross Gray; Steph
    Bradley; 1 floor-layer – Peter Jaconelli.  

8: 3 joiners – Ronnie Marshall; Jason Nelson; William Meikle.  

9: 3 joiners – Panny McAllister; Colin Robertson; Chic Heron; 1 plumber – Alan
    McManus.

10: 4 fixers (ceiling and partition) – Alex Scott; Gary McCuish; Paul McKenzie; John
      Vance.

11: 1 plasterer – Brian Illand; 1 joiner – Gerry Elliot; 1 labourer – Andy Dumpster.      

12: The marblers, stencillers and frieze painters: Nichol Wheatley, Stephan Gardiner,
      Jonathan Gowing.

13: The painters: Richard Todd, Robert Salmon, Martin Salmon, Alasdair Gray.  

Nichol Wheatley expects to finish the marbling and painted frieze before 2007, Alasdair Gray to finish to heads on mirrors by then. The eastern gable and upper gallery walls should be completed in 2007, then the north and south walls above the arches will be painted with a repeat design of huge trees, then the sloping ceiling of the side aisles. Lastly will come a design on the panel above the bar, one of the smallest surfaces in the building, roughly 18 feet by 6, but one of the most noticeable when staring upward from the auditorium floor. Before painting started, Colin Beattie told me he knew I could give no deadline for the completion of this scheme, which is becoming the most ambitious of its kind in Scotland. However, I may finish it by 2010, if I am spared.      



  

Kelvingrove Renovations: A Letter

The Herald
Letters Page

Dear Sir,
       Over two weeks ago the Herald arranged to give me an early view of the Glasgow Kelvingrove Art Gallery renovations, enabling me to write about these in the Saturday Herald. My article described a display called Conflict and Consequences in the main museum level, in which armour and weapons were shown beside or under horned and tusked beasts with a fearsome shark. On a visit with the BBC yesterday I find that the display has now been shifted upstairs close to the Holocaust display with photograph of Anne Frank, and the Koran found outside Kabul in the 19th century by an unknown Scottish soldier, also a case containing silver wire standing sculptures of human bodies, or perhaps only of their nervous systems.

     The curator, Mark O’Neill, told me these arrangements were better than the old ones where natural history exhibits, human artefacts and paintings were displayed separately – better because more democratic, since people would have to find their own connections between such very different things, instead of having the connections made clear. I regard this as a Post-modern idea. I am an old-fashioned chap who insists on being just modern.

     Yours truly, Alasdair Gray