SHIPYARD, the story of a painting.

Oil on canvas, 81cms. x 64cms.
1967

This painting is a survivor. It is now over fifty years old and was lucky enough not to be committed to the annual bonfire of my student work I had every summer. For many years it languished in the attic but always had some personal value for me. It was a product of a unique experience and for me, a painting in a breakthrough style.

 I started at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, in 1965. In those days there was a two year general course before specialising in the subject of your choice. I was keen to be a painter. I worked hard but I don't think I was regarded as having more than average promise. The painting school was run by Alberto Morocco and like all the Scottish art schools the course was very traditional. The emphasis was on life drawing, painting and still life. 'Composition', where you could make paintings of your own subject, was the place where aspiring artists could shine. At the end of the second year those of us going into the painting school were told to make a painting over the holidays. There was no specific subject given and the return to college in late September seemed far away. I had no idea what I would do.

As it happened, I was lucky to get a summer job working as a plumbers mate at Burntisland shipyard. The duties were quite simple, just to assist the plumber with another pair of hands, fetch and carry and generally make myself useful. The work was not hard and there was usually some free time when pipes were being prepared or waiting for access to areas where other trades were working. My plumber was tall and gentlemanly and as a tradesman wore a collar and tie, a bunnet on his bald head and a clean brown boiler suite that was belted in the middle. He never swore but had a dry sense of humour.

"Dougie, you know, this ship was designed in Switzerland. I'll let you into a secret. Why don't you go down to the engine room, into the double bottom and find the golden rivet."

He tried all the usual ones like

"Dougie, go to the stores and ask the store man for a long stand." 

If you fell for that one the store man said.

"A long stand? I think there's one somewhere. I'll be back in a minute."

When we were not working in tight, dark corners bolting flanges together I would be out on deck, watching what was going on. Big sections of rusty steel would hang in the air as cranes lowered them to the deck. There was the constant flash of welding and cascades of sparks as burners cut through plates. Although riveting was almost a thing of the past the noise of metal clanging on metal was intense. Then the hooter would blow and in an instant all fell silent. Tea break. As if from nowhere flocks of seagulls circled as men opened their haversacks and unwrapped their pieces. The burners would reduce the pressure of their torches to a yellow flame and play it on blackened syrup tins with a screw of tea leaves in them. The hooter blew, the gulls flew off, the cranes began to swing and the clanging, bashing and flashing continued till dinner time.

One afternoon, when things seemed slack, I skived off and went to look for a pall who was an engineer. I knew there was a big push going on in the engine room  and to get there I had to go down though the decks of the engine trunking .This was open to the sky and as I descended the steel companion ways there was an outbreak of shouting and laughter above me. Sparks had set fire to an awning and blackened canvas drifted down as men pulled it down and stamped the flames out. I stared down into the depths at the top of an enormous diesel engine. The three cylinders were open and I could see one of them held a person. I could only see the top of his head but recognized Richard. He was standing in the giant cylinder pot with a small square of abrasive, rubbing it smooth. I shouted above the din,

"Richard! How do you get all the good jobs?"

He looked up with the expression of a martyred Saint. There was nothing to be said.

Laying deck service pipes in a straight line was easy, but it was not all like this. In difficult sections, like the bow, there were no straight lines at all. A template had to be tacked together, using thin strips of wood then carefully carried to the plumbers shop where the workshop team took over. The template was laid on a large metal bed, perforated with holes and steel pegs inserted at every bend. A suitable pipe was filled with sand, (to stop it buckling) heated red hot and placed on the bed. A cable attached to a winch bent the pipe round the steel peg. This could be done several times, till the pipe was true to the template.

For me, all this was a visual feast. Every day the hulls in the stocks changed colour as the red leaders rolled on different layers of paint. They reminded me of giant Rothko paintings, which at that time  I'd only seen in books. I've seen a lot of Rothko's since and for me the ships hulls were much better. I thought of taking in a sketch book and doing some surreptitious drawing, but my senses were over awed and I hadn't learnt yet to be selective. I was also frightened of the ribbing I'd get being seen to be an artist. The word had spread, however, that I was an art student.

One day I was high on the superstructure when a young welder came up to me.

"Whit dae ye dae?"

"I'm an art student."

"Aye, a ken that, but whit exactly dae ye dae?"

"I study drawing and painting."

"Aye, but whit dae ye paint? Dae ye ever paint lassies?"

"Oh aye, we have to do life drawing and life painting."

"Life drawing, whits that?"

"Oh, just drawing the human figure."

"An these lassies, dae they hae ony claithes on?"

"Nope! Not a stitch."

"Totally naked, nae nickers or onything?"

"Nude"

"Naked nude? Fuck me!"

"Actually, it's really boring."

"AW JIMMY, THIS BOYS GONNAE DRAW US A BIG NUDE!"

When I left the shipyard to go back to college the sights, smells, sounds and even the taste of rusty metal and red lead went with me. I was bursting with sensations.

I arrived in Dundee a few days before college was due to start. I'd rented an old flat in St. Peters Street, part of the 'Twilight Zone' that was soon to be demolished. Things were, to say the least, basic, but it was cheap and only a hole in the wall where I could come back to sleep. There was a little box room with an easel so I quickly stretched a canvas and primed it with emulsion paint, which dried quickly. I had no problem about subject matter as my head was full of shipyard. I painted quite spontaneously with no preparation and it was still wet when I took it into college.

A tutor came into the studio to see what everyone had done and give us a crit. This was Dennis Buchan, one of the younger members of staff. Usually he lit a fag and drew heavily on it while he pondered the work. When he saw my painting, however, he cried out,

"Wow! Who did this? Where did that come from?"

He seemed genuinely surprised. I was pleased with this response and painted a longer version, looking down on two vessels. This was accepted for the Scottish Young Contemporaries exhibition held at the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh and sold for £25, which seemed like a lot of money. Unfortunately, at this time I lacked the confidence to sign my work so I had to take my box of paints to Edinburgh and make a signature, a lesson I've never forgotten. That painting disappeared from my life, but a few years ago I found it online in an auction house in Glasgow. The title was given as Dundee Shipyard and attributed to one Douglas Stannus Gray, (1890 - 1959), whose work is completely different from mine and died seven years before it was painted. Whoever bought it got a bargain, for it went for only £170.

It was years later that I found that Stanley Spencer had served as a war artist on the Clyde and made a remarkable and unparalleled record of ship building. When I viewed these paintings in the 1980 exhibition at the Royal Academy it was as if I was back in Burntisland. All that was missing was the noise and I could remember that. Sadly, the yard which had built 310 ships and worked for over fifty years failed two years after my summer there. The ship that I worked on, the Ohrmazd, was financed by the British Government for Pakistan. There were endless changes and wrangling over equipment, so that the contract over ran. This incurred severe financial penalties which the company couldn't pay and closed in 1969.