A MARXIST AESTHETICIAN

A Marxist Aesthetician
Oil on canvas. 66 x 41cms.

 To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what a Marxist Aesthetician is, although I may have been one back in the 1970's with the rest of my London palls. Things were different then. No one in their right mind would claim to be a Marxist now.

This painting had a long gestation. In the late 1980's I was living in Edinburgh and making prints at Edinburgh Printmakers. The local waterhole was Mathers Bar at the top of Broughton Street. There was a guy who drank there with a face like a pale half moon who wore thick specs and a purple corduroy cap with a Soviet red star on it. I thought of him as the Marxist Aesthetician because he put together an exhibition about consumerism which was worthy but a bit boring. I made a small painting and a wood cut based on him The painting wasn't a success but I sold two or three of the prints, which wasn't bad as I'd only editioned five.

a Marxist Aesthetician
Woodcut on Paper

One thing I've learned is that my brain has a compartment reserved for unresolved projects. A couple of years ago the idea of a painting of a Marxist Aesthetician popped up again, this time a full figure. I also had a memory from my London days which was a bit like a ludicrous dream. One evening I had gone to a small, dark hall in north London for a debate about Marxism and Culture. This was completely boring and a waste of time but I came away with the bizarre image of the three Marxist academics that were sitting on the stage as the learned panel. They were identically dressed in sports jackets, shirts and ties, corduroy trousers and stout tan brogues. This was unremarkable but what was astounding was the fact that they all sported large beards. I immediately realised this was because they were disciples of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, both great proponents of the Power Beard.

Anyone who is a student of portraiture will realise that male facial hair goes in and out of fashion. The Georgians hated it. The ruddy faced gentlemen portrayed by Raeburn all had good barbers. They would not be seen in public without a powdered wig and a close shave. Modern research suggests that even the Jacobite army of 1745, usually regarded as a column of monstrous hairiness was, for the most part, clean shaven. Shaving stood for civilization but beards were barbarous and degenerate.

The Victorians changed all that. Surprisingly, the engine of change was the British Army, an institution not normally associated with fashion. During the Crimean campaign the winter conditions were so harsh that the soldiers were excused shaving. Returning veterans with their luxuriant beards were regarded as heroes and civilians took up the fashion in emulation. Things got out of hand and beard growing turned into a sport which I call Power Bearding. The Victorians bestrode the World and saw themselves as Old Testament prophets, booming there wisdom through hairy lips. Darwin had a beard, as did Charles Dickens. The poets Tennyson and Browning grew beards as did Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Across the Atlantic Abraham Lincoln grew a beard as did the poet Walt Whitman and the author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville. In Russia, Tolstoy grew a beard and in France the painters Claude Monet and Toulouse Lautrec. Even Sigmund Freud grew a well manicured beard but the psychology of male facial hair seems to have escaped him.

This explains the power beard of the Marxist Aesthetician. He has the intense, short sighted gaze of the zealot, wears a workers denim jacket to show solidarity with the proletariat and of course, wears red socks and scarf. His portfolio is decorated with the inevitable symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and a portrait of the poster boy of the fashionable left, Che Guevara. Up above, in a Communist Heaven, Marx and Engels look pityingly down on him

 

THE LAST WOLF IN SCOTLAND

 

1743. The last wolf in Scotland
Oil on canvas, 66cms x 86cms

1. THE FOREST

Deep in the hills grew a forest. In this forest was an open, heathery glade. In the middle of this glade was a great heap of boulders, believed to have been thrown there by giants of a previous age.

At the edge of this clearing, hidden in the heather, lay a man and a boy who were spying on the boulders.

"Now is the time," said the man, "The adult wolves have gone, lets get the cubs."

The entrance to the den was a narrow tunnel under the boulders.

"I am too broad to get in there," said his father. "Take this club and go in and smack the cubs on the head."

The boy was keen and without hesitation squirmed up the tunnel. The man leaned on his knee and peered into the darkness, completely unaware that the mother wolf was bounding up behind him. She brushed past him angry and snarling and started frantically wriggling up the tunnel to save her cubs.

"Father! Father! Why has it grown so dark?" cried the boy.

The man did the only thing he could and grabbed the wolves tail. He braced his feet against the banking and pulled and pulled. His eyes bulged and he broke out in cold sweat. Slowly the rear of the wolf emerged. With one hand still holding the tail he grabbed his dirk and stabbed it, one, two, three times right up to the hilt.

"Are you all right son? I thought you were about to become the wolves dinner."

The boy pulled out the bodies of the wolf cubs. The father cut off their tails and that of the mother.

"Well" he said," Not a bad days work. The chief will pay a fine bounty for our trouble."

Later that day the rest of the pack returned to the scene of the slaughter. They were muzzling round the bodies when they heard a whining coming from the den. A young female entered and gently carried out a surviving cub in her mouth. Although she had no milk she regurgitated some partially digested meat so that the little wolf could eat.

The man did not receive his hard earned reward personally from the Chief, as he had hoped, but the estate factor. The present Chief was often away from home, on affairs of State, it was said, but in reality living in London gambling and whoring. He had lost heavily at the gaming tables and was short of money. Returning north he looked around the land of his people to see what could easily be converted into gold. Now, at this time there was great talk about war with France and the navy needed timber for ships and wood to fuel the furnaces that smelted the iron to make  cannon. The chiefs eyes settled on what remained of the great forests. So the wolf grew up in a world that was shrinking, as the great trees of the forest crashed down.

2. THE TINCHEL

The chief had some of his southern friends staying with him in the castle. One night, at dinner, an English Lord expounded at length on the glories of English hunting and the superior quality and quantity of game on his estates. The chief grew red and puffed out his chest.

"Hunting, you say! Hunting! I will show you hunting."

Next morning he called in his factor.

"Who is our best hunter?"

"Macqueen," 

"Bring him to me," ordered the chief." 

"I would have a tinchel" said the chief, "can you organise that?"

"Yes, it is possible. But the old dyke is fallen down in places and needs repair."

"Take who you need. You can have all the men. Bring out the whole glen if need be. I aim to give my lowland friends a hunt to remember."  

In the half light of dawn hundreds of men assembled on the green in front of the castle so that Macqueen could give them his orders. These were simple but not so easy to do. They were to march up the glen onto the high moors, then spread out in a great semicircle. The next morning they shook the dew from their plaids and started beating the heather with sticks and shouting. They chased everything before them; mountain hares, foxes, wild cats, roe deer and great herds of stags and hinds.

At the narrowest point of the glen Macqueen was overseeing the rebuilding of the high wall. This ran from hilltop to hilltop across the glen with only a narrow gap on the valley floor. Through this gap the wild things would be driven. The chief came riding up with his friends and gillies were busy loading muskets. Stacks of arms, dirks, broadswords and old Lochaber axes were being distributed to whoever was strong enough to use them.

When he had done all he could he climbed up the slope out of the way of stray shot and crouched on a boulder. From his perch he could see deer streaming down the sides of the glen as the ring of men tightened. Then it appeared to him as if the valley floor was moving. They were surging through the open woodland like an irresistible wave. When the leaders were within a hundred yards of the wall they stopped, sensing a trap. Some of them streamed up the hillside but were blocked by the high dyke. But the ring of men tightened, pushing them on. A few made a dash for the gap but as they passed through the chief opened fire and downed one. His ghillie passed him another gun, then another. Then his guests fired. The crackle of muskets was continuous now as the deer plunged and died. For a time the slaughter was obscured from Macqueen by the thick pall of musket smoke. Then the firing slowed and stopped, as they ran out of powder and ball.

With a great shout the gillies charged in, hacking and thrusting at the terrified deer. Some were cleanly killed but others ran off with blood streaming from terrible wounds. He saw an English duchess, her face blackened with gunpowder from firing a dozen muskets. She was so enthused by the slaughter that she kilted up her skirts and grabbing a dirk from a ghillie, dived into the slaughter. His hounds strained at the leash but he would not release them, for he saw an enraged stag flick a dog high in the sky with the points of it's antlers and now it hung helpless over the branch of a tree with a broken back.

When the frenzied butchery had stopped and the surviving animals fled he descended to the killing ground and set the gillies to gralloch the deer. The chieftain ordered fires to be made and brandy, claret, ale and whisky brought from the deep cellars of the castle. Women and children arrived carrying cheeses, cream and oatmeal to make bannocks with. Deer were roasted over the fires and pipers and fiddlers played for the dance.

Macqueen and the factor were employed in sorting out and classifying the game, which the factor recorded in a big book. When the chief read out the tally of slaughter to his guests his chest swelled with pride and delight.

5 roe deer.

7 roe buck.

125 red deer hinds

141 ditto stags

7 wild cats

9 foxes

3 goats

5 wolves

3. CRY WOLF

March came in and the land was held in the grip of hard frosts. The wolf was starving and driven to desperate measures. One evening she crept down to a clachan and spotted a scrawny cockerel strutting about a midden .She made a lunge for it just as a child came round the corner of the house and with the squawking bird in her mouth ran off across the infields. The child bawled on his mother who came running out and saw the wolf jump the head dyke and into the pasture. The woman told her husband who told his sister. His sister told her neighbor who was leaning on a dyke talking to a packman who was selling threads and needles. The packman called at every clachan in the glen to sell his wears so the story spread like wildfire. Before long, it was not that a child had seen a wolf run off with a cockerel but that a wolf had run off with a child. By the time the story had reached the chief in his castle a huge, black monster of a wolf had brutally dragged off and eaten two children.

"I will have it's head!" swore the chief. "Bring me Macqueen."

"Two children she has eaten." said the chief, "I will not have it."

"Ach, I passed by there today and the children are as cheeky as ever. I am thinking this story has grown in the telling."

"I mean to have it" roared the chief. "I am calling out all the men. You are the best hunter. You must come with us."

"Then let it be so" replied Macqueen, "I will see you tomorrow."

Macqueen did not wait for the morning but set out in the middle of the night. He took a track that led to the hills. The man and his dogs padded quietly along, leaving clouds of breath in the cold night air. Soon they were out of the trees and among the rocks and heather, where the moon glistened on big snow fields. They followed the course of a burn whose boulders were covered by treacherous ice, then entered a shallow gulley. A few tenacious rowan trees were growing among boulders and broken crags enclosed it on either side. At the entrance to the gulley lay a snowfield. He could see lines of frozen pawmarks leading across it and the dogs were sniffing with obvious interest. He chose a spot with the breeze in his face and a good view above the entrance to the gulley and wrapped himself in his plaid and waited.

The first grey streak lightened in the east. Ground mist covered the floor of the glen and in the stillness of dawn he heard a dog bark in a distant clachan. The sun came blazing over the eastern hills but there was no sign of the wolf. His limbs were stiff so he stretched them a little and the welcome warmth of the sun made him want to sleep. Then the dogs growled and their ears pricked forward. A dark shape was making it's way slowly across the snow field. The wolf was still too far away for an accurate shot so he waited, then thought,

"I'll set the dogs on her."

He unleashed the two hounds who spread out to cut off both her advance and retreat. In her prime the wolf would have picked up their scent sooner but Bran, the youngest, was on her before she knew it. He had more enthusiasm than skill so  she side stepped and bit him so hard on the muzzle that Macqueen heard bones crack. Breaking free, she made a quick tear at his throat then bounded away. The other dog was close on her tail and over taking, bit her flank. She turned and there was a savage flurry of snarling, ripping teeth. She broke away with the other dog, bloodied and more respectful now, chasing behind her. She was within musket range but the wolf was moving fast so that it was a difficult, tracking shot. He had one chance. Macqueen fired.

"Dam it! Missed"

The wolf bounded on then suddenly it's front legs seemed to crumple and it pitched head over heels and lay twitching on the snow.

It was mid day before he returned to the glen. When he came close to the castle he could see hundreds of men and boys lazing in the park and the chief, obviously in a temper, pacing up and down.

"What time of day is this?" roared the chief, "It's too late now to go hunting."

"What's your hurry?" asked Macqueen, and threw the wolfs head down at the chieftains feet.

4. EXILES

That may have been the end for the last wolf in Scotland, or maybe not. There are other stories and other last wolves. However, this is not quite the end of our story.

After swithering this way and that the chief backed the loosing side in a dynastic dispute. He had little enthusiasm for his severed head being displayed on an iron spike in London town, so took a fair wind to France. As Macqueen was one of the few good men to survive the disastrous military campaign he employed him as body guard. The job did not last long, for in France the old chief took seriously to the brandy and died within a year. Macqueen did the only thing he knew and joined a regiment of exiles serving the French King. His martial talents were noted and he rose quickly though the ranks. He married a French girl and the family prospered, one of their sons becoming a marshal in Napoleon's army.

TWEED PRICKS

Portrait of the young artist as a Tweed Prick
Oil on canvas, 600 x 800 mm.  2022 

I am not, never have been or ever will be a dedicated follower of fashion. The song by the Kinks said it all. That said, I have to admit I can still remember what I was wearing on the day I started at Dundee College of Art. This was because I was still a chrysalis, dressed mostly by my mum. I was wearing a striped shirt, narrow woolen tie, cardigan, sports jacket and fawn cavalry twill trousers. On my feet I wore suede Hush Puppy shoes. Under clothes consisted of string vest and pants. This was my choice as it was the type worn in 1953 on Mount Everest and I felt they had special, possibly mystical powers. This was perfectly normal in 1965 but art students weren't meant to be normal.

Looking round the college canteen my gaze fell on a corner occupied by a group of final year students. This was the age of minimalist skirts and coloured tights. The girls looked wonderfully long legged, elegant and for me, unapproachably mature. The guys dressed in paint spattered jeans and wooly jumpers, with the occasional ex-army leather jerkin. They were silent and contemplative, drawing deeply on cigarettes or stroking luxuriant beards which I could never hope to grow. These, I thought, were real artists. Everything that could be said had been said. It was obvious that they were thinking deep thoughts.

On that first day I felt I was dressed like an office worker and as a new boy stood out like a sore thumb. Instead of transforming into a colourful butterfly, which was the way male fashion was going at the time, it was necessary to metamorphose into a drab moth. Jeans were essential and wooly, polo neck jumpers, easily obtainable from workwear and army surplus shops. Of course, I kept wearing the string vest. On top of this ensemble, I threw an old U.S. Marines parka of Korean war vintage. It only took a few weeks to transform from a raw schoolboy to a seemingly confident art student. All the jeans needed was a suitable application of randomly spattered daubs of paint.

I was happy like this for a year or so, but at the start of the new autumn term my sartorial complacency was given a rude shock. Into the studio strode my friend, John Kirkwood. He was resplendent in several yards of brown, tweed suite. He had been working over the holidays and invested in some clothes.

"Wow! The suite looks fantastic. Where did you get it?"

"It was in the sale at Jaegers on Princess Street. It wasn't too expensive."

I have to admit I coveted this suite. However, as it would be nearly a year before I could earn any money again, I had to practice delayed gratification, a form of virtuous behavior now out of fashion.

The young artist as a plumber's mate

Oil on board, 458mm x 610mm.  2022

The year passed and the summer came round again. I found a job at Burntisland shipyard as a plumber's mate (see Shipyard, the story of a painting, Sept 2020) and after a couple of months had saved enough to buy a suite. I took the bus to Kirkcaldy High Street which had several gents' tailors such as John Colliers and Hepworth's. There I flipped through book after book of materials while thin, white- faced men scurried around with tape measures. Clearly, asking for a tweed suite was considered extremely eccentric for Kirkcaldy and they had few samples. I found a grey, herring bone Harris Tweed and finally settled for that. They checked my measurements three times because they knew the tailors wouldn't believe the size of me. After this unpleasant humiliation I was quite happy to wait a few weeks while it was being constructed.

I loved that suite. I could wear it to any function with shirt and tie or casually with a polo neck.  By this time, I'd decided the only place for paint was on the canvas, so wore a boiler suite over the suite to keep it clean when painting. I wore it to my graduation from Dundee, my post-graduation and also for an interview in London for the Royal College of Art. It must have done the trick, for I was accepted.

A suitable accompaniment to tweed is a pair of strong, tan brogues. I knew from childhood that leather soles were slippery and wore out quickly. My father had a set of cobblers lasts in the garden shed so I hammered in heel and toe plates then covered the soles with steel studs. This gave me a good grip, but I sounded like the Brigade of Guards marching down the street.

One day I left the college in Kensington and jumped on a number 49 bus, which took me to Clapham Junction. As usual, I was sitting on the top deck. When the bus approached my stop, I jumped up and clattered down the stairs. Unfortunately, the steel studs slipped on the steel stairs and I came down violently on my backside, striking the sharp edge of the tread. This was a sair one and brought tears to my eyes. I could hardly walk across the Common to the flat. I thought I had broken my coccyx and it took months to clear up. To prevent this happening again I pulled the studs off the soles and took the shoes to a cobbler to fit rubber, stick on soles.

Not long after this I was walking down a corridor in the painting school of the college and noticed a couple of lads hanging about. They seemed slightly younger than me and I didn't recognize them as fellow students. As I approached, they were watching me with sly, insolent grins on their faces. As I passed. I couldn't help hear one of them say,

"Yeh! That's what this place is like. It's full of tweed pricks."

"Yeh, Tweed pricks."

I was well passed them but paused for a second as the red mist of rage boiled up in me. 

"I'll throw the little shites down the stairs. Bastards!"

I was fuming but held my temper, though only just.

I went home and thought about this for weeks. It had got to me. I was even angry about being angry over such a trivial thing. I was sickened by the whole episode and had no desire to wear the suite again. After all, I was living in London and maybe it was time for a change of image. One evening I took the suite off its hanger, bundled it up and threw it in the bin.

Art Students
Offset drawing and watercolour on paper,
 2022

HAME TOON

Hame Toon

Oil on canvas

As a child I seemed to have spent a long time waiting to become an adult but thankfully never really achieved that status. Most of all I wanted to flee from the Royal Burgh of Kinghorn which I considered depressingly dull and parochial. 

After spending many years in Dundee, London and Edinburgh however, I began to realise what a great place Kinghorn actually was. When I moved back I spent much of my spare time roaming along the Fife coast, sketching the old harbours and docks that are often ruinous reminders of Fifes rich nautical heritage. In the course of this I did a number of drawings and paintings of the Kinghorn area and some of these are shown here.

Every morning, come rain, hail or shine I'd walk down the hill with the dogs to the beach. Invariably Davy and his crony Fred would be leaning over the harbour wall chewing the fat. Usually their talk was of the weather or fishing but the words I've

put into their mouths are dysfunctional art speak.

"I'd rather be in a landscape by Mackintosh Patrick than this shite."

"This felt suit by Joseph Beuys is braw and warm."

I was still at school when I started drawing out of doors. The more I think about it the stranger this activity seems and initially it took a certain amount of courage to overcome my teenage embarrassment. Nowadays I try to blend in with the environment and choose a drawing station so that unwanted visitors can't creep up behind me. One day I was making an ink drawing of the view from Dodhead towards Burntisland. This is an area lost in the fields at the edge of an escarpment that is rarely visited. I was concentrating on my work but suddenly had the uneasy sensation that I was being watched. I turned round and found a fox standing a few feet away, curiously observing me. It loped casually away not the least bit concerned.

Burntisland from Dodhead
Ink on paper
Private collection

At school I was encouraged to draw out of doors by my art teacher, Tom Gourdie M.B.E. He became well known for his numerous books on calligraphy but was also a prolific water colourist. He made many paintings of places in Kirkcaldy that were about to be swept away by the 1960's redevelopments. He also painted every coal mine in Fife, a collection that was purchased by the National Coal Board. Where this work is now I do not know but they have a historical significance as all the pits have gone

Old houses, Kinghorn 1964

Ball point on paper

Gourdie encouraged the use of the ball point pen and added his own hand to this drawing by strengthening the shading. He probably didn't realise then that ball point ink fades and the drawing, now badly foxed, has survived because it spent a long time in a dark attic. At art college I discovered the wonderful graphic qualities of Indian ink, used with steel and reed pens and tonal washes. I made several more drawings of these old houses over the years but never drew in ball point again.

The Nethergate from Kinghorn churchyard.

Ink and watercolour on paper.

Private collection

In the 1960's Kinghorn began to change quite rapidly. Part of the High Street and South Overgate were redeveloped and private housing began to spread over the old wartime fortifications on Crying Hill and down Pettycur road. There was a bottle works at Pettycur harbour and a siding off the main railway line brought in sand and took new whisky bottles away. When I was a student I did this pencil sketch from high on Kinghorn golf course. The people who built the new houses on Crying Hill complained of the smoke from the bottle works chimney and this had to be extended in height. Most Horner's thought,

"Well, what do you expect if your stupid enough to build a house near to the top of a smoking lum?"

The bottle works closed in 1982 and the area is now private housing.

Kinghorn bottle works
Pencil on paper 1968

Pettycur pier
Ink and watercolour on paper
Private collection

 

Pettycur pier was constructed for the ferry that sailed regularly from Kinghorn to Leith. No one knows when it started but by the 1830's steam boats were running that connected to a stage coach service. It was closed down in 1847 when the railway opened connecting with the ferry from Burntisland to Granton. By the 1960's the pier was in a desolate state with only two vessels moored there. These were cabin cruisers, the Silver Arrow owned by Mr. Young of Craigencalt and the Silver Spray owned by Millers the Bakers. High on the wall at the start of the pier stood the harbour masters house. This had a wooden veranda to the rear with steps that led down to a sandy inlet for access to the low water pier. You can still see the pier at low tide but the house, a wonderfully quaint structure, was demolished and the back harbour is now a car park built over Kinghorn's sewage treatment works.

The Old Ferry Pier, Pettycur
Oil on canvas, 50cms x 70cms

The Spring storm of 2010 almost cut the pier in half but has now been repaired. It is a popular spot for leisure fishermen and there are seventeen wooden sheds nestling along the piers length. However, at the time of writing there are only ten moored boats, although two or three of these are professional creel boats.

Fishermen's Huts, Pettycur
Oil on board, 46cms x 61cms

The loss of the ferry must have been a serious financial blow to the Burgh but eventually the railway brought in new industry. The Abden shipyard opened in 1864 with iron, boilers and some workers being brought in by rail. This must have transformed the old decaying seaport into a noisy industrial town with hundreds of riveters hammering vigorously on red hot rivets. To make the environment worse a glue works had opened at the top of the Braes in 1854. Glue making consisted in the prolonged boiling of animal skins or bones and created a terrible smell. There was also trouble with effluent from the glue works running down the braes to the beach. Possibly worst of all was the human excrement that spewed out onto the sand at low tide. This was still a problem when I was a teenager and I remember asking a Royal Burgh councilor if any thing could be done about this. His reply was as astonishing as it was ignorant. He stated that as the faeces was in salt water it could do you no harm! For all that the holiday makers kept on coming and Kinghorn, like all the Fife coastal towns was packed out during the Glasgow and Edinburgh fairs. That is, until the 1970's when cheap air travel and package holidays whisked the population away to Spain.

The Abden ship yard had it's ups and downs and launched it's last ship, the S.S. Kinghorn in 1923. The three slipways are best seen at low tide and over the years I made several drawings of them. The sea has inevitably taken it's toll and it's hard to believe that it was such a busy and industrious place. The area is now a holiday caravan park.

The old slipways, Abden
Ink and watercolour on paper

The power of the sea is irresistible and on 1st March 2010 the old limestone sea wall that had been built by the shipyard was breached by a ferocious storm. Two mobile homes ended in the sea, fortunately unoccupied. I was down at the front a few minutes after high tide. There was a north easterly gale blowing, a very high tide and a meter storm surge in the north sea caused by the gale. This conjunction caused massive coastline erosion. Kinghorn Bay was like an enormous washing machine with broken boats, gas canisters, mattresses and numerous lengths of timber from the mobile homes churning around in the waves. Boats had been swept across the tank top which was almost submerged and the end of the old life boat shed smashed in. The big doors of the current life boat station were buckled by the weight of water and stones driven against it.

I returned the next morning and the Council had a team down on the beach doing a great job clearing the debris. The waves had scoured all the sand away down to the bedrock but piled a drift of stones against the promenade. The most remarkable discovery was the sheets of metal cladding from the mobile homes had been rolled into perfect green balls just like crumpled sheets of paper. Such is the power of the churning sea.

This was an unusual event and one that I thought worthy of recording. Some years previously I had painted a number of coastal scenes but destroyed most of them. I kept a few that were more successful and hid them away in the attic. One of those was of Kinghorn bay. All the buildings were there but the area of the beach and sea was empty and decidedly boring. Now I knew how to fill it.

Kinghorn Storm

Oil on board

916mm x 1220mm

We are now being warned to expect more extreme weather events such as this as global warming continues to increase. It is with some irony that I remember how my generation was brought up to take pride in Britain's and especially Scotland's part in the Industrial Revolution. We are now suffering from it's down side. The shipyards, coal mines, steel works and all kinds of manufacturing have been swept away or transferred to other countries where labour is cheaper and environmental controls less strict. But at least locally the Firth of Forth is much cleaner than it used to be. There are signs that fish are beginning to return. I never thought I'd be able to stand on Kinghorn Braes and watch the great splash of a breaching Humpback whale.

Southbound, Kinghorn
Oil on board, 916mm x 1220mm

 

GETTING WISDOM

Getting Wisdom
Oil on board. 305mm x 410mm

"Boy! You're just down from the trees!

I hung my head in shame.

"Stand up! Hold out you're hands!" The taws zipped through the air with a suddenness of a lightening strike and connected with my flesh. I'd never been belted before. The pain was excruciating and I had to bite my lip to prevent a sob as tears ran down my face. I was eleven years old. The humiliation of being branded a failure was almost as bad as the pain.

"You children have all passed your Eleven Plus exam and are the top ten per cent of the population," announced the Rector of Kirkcaldy High School on our first day. Our innocent faces beamed with pleasure at the thought of enlightened Academia but this was the harsh reality.

"That will teach you to learn your French Vocabulary. You'll get this every time you forget a word. This applies to all you boys." He strutted about in front of the class a demented martinet. His eyes flashed and his grey moustache bristled. He obviously enjoyed it. He was the GRIME

The fearsome reputation of the Grime had filtered down to us and strong, mature men still wince at his memory. None of the stories we'd heard prepared us for this blitzkrieg of violence and French verbs. I began to live in terror of Monday mornings when we had a double period of French. In those days I still believed in God and in the crush of pupils surging inexorably upstairs I'd pray with fervent intensity;

"Oh God! Dear God!

Protect me this day in my darkest hour of need.

May I be able to answer all the questions correctly

and be spared humiliation and the belt.

Make me invisible to him

so his terror passes over me,

or let him have an illness or accident

so he cannot attend school.

Please God! Please God! Please God!

Unfortunately God seemed to be permanently engaged elsewhere. The petty fears of an eleven year old boy seem inconsequential compared to the vast horrors of the universe. The Grime would ask questions round the class,

"What is the meaning of this? How do you say that?" till he came to us dunderheads in the front few rows and the systematic violence began.

"Clelland! Stand up!" Whack! Whack! Whack!

"Gray! Your just down from the trees!" Whack! Whack! Whack! 

"You took it like a man" said Hoss in the playground after one vicious belting.

"Look at this" I said and held out my hands. He'd been a bit off target and hit my wrists which were bruised purple and swollen.

"The bastard" said Hoss, "The bastard."

All this was beyond rational thought and in the realm of terror. On Monday mornings I started to feel ill and complain of headaches

"Douglas, we'll have to take you to the doctor if this goes on."

"Where's the pain?" asked the doctor.

"Round here," I said indicating generally my forehead and face.

"It may be his sinuses" suggested the doctor, "I'll arrange for an X-Ray."

All this meant time off school and I was happy.

I was taken into a room with a large X-Ray machine.

"Sit down and press your face against these cross lines." The radiographer retreated and there was a buzz as I was X-Rayed.

"There's nothing on the X-Rays," said the doctor. "How do you feel now?"

"Much the same. Not too bad."

One day the Grime made an announcement.

"Right! This is a class exam. I want you all to do well in this. I'm going to walk round and look at your papers and if I see one mistake you'll get one of the belt, two mistakes two of the belt and so on. Do you understand!"

He was crystal clear. We were dumbstruck.

Towards the end of the period he started at the back of the class looking over shoulders.

"That's spelt wrong! Stand up!" Whack!

"Look! Two mistakes. There and there!" Whack! Whack!

He came to Baker who was one of the top pupils.

"Baker! Stand up! You've made a mistake."

The class turned round to watch this unaccustomed event. Baker blanched white as his chair scraped back and he held out his shaking hands. He'd never been belted before.

Whack!

"That was a stupid mistake. You should have known better," roared the Grime. Then he came to the front row where we sat trembling in terror waiting for the beating of our lives. He looked at my paper.

"If I belted you for every mistake I'd kill you." Then he left us alone.

The dark days of winter passed and if there wasn't a thawing of the Grime he realised that some of us were a lost cause and not worth the aggravation. As Spring passed into Summer and the days stretched out it was the tradition for each class to organise an evening bus trip.

"Any idea where we should go?" asked Kinninmonth.

"Isn't it a bit late? Most classes have had their trips organized for months."

"It's more a matter of who'll go with us, I bet the best teachers have been nabbed by other classes."

A few days later my heart sank when I heard the news. We had a bus and the only teacher who wasn't booked up - the Grime.

The Grime sat beside the French student at the front of the bus. We were subdued all the way to Alva but disgorged a chaotic rabble. I thought I'd explore Alva Glen but others with more energy than brains took to the slopes and rolled boulders down the steep hill. There was moaning about why we had come to this boring place then a frantic hunt for the fish and chip shop where we loaded up with suppers and bottles of lemonade. It was on the road back that Baker displayed a perfect sense of timing. Everyone who travels by bus realises that the long back seat, although coveted by small boys, suffers the greatest movement. Baker was sitting there with his palls guzzling greasy fish and slugging back a big bottle of pink lemonade. Just before Burntisland he began to go green. As we approached a roundabout he staggered forward to the front of the bus with his hand over his mouth.

"Please Sir! Please Sir! I think I'm going to be AAAAArgh" The bus lurched as he projected the full contents of his bloated stomach over the head of the Grime, his jacket and trousers and cascading onto the blouse and skirt of the unfortunate French student.

"Pull in driver! Pull in!"

The coach pulled over to the verge and the Grime got out. The whole class pressed their faces against the windows watching him trying to wipe the spew off with a hanky. His head was decorated with flakes of undigested haddock and big, greasy chips .Oh joy, sweet joy!

 

WAITING FOR A WHALE TO DIE

Waiting for a whale to die.
510mm x 635mm. Oil on canvas, 2008

 

Many of my paintings have stories attached to them and this one is true but also sad. One of the first shouts I had as a volunteer Coastguard was to go to Burntisland docks where a whale had grounded at the inside of the western breakwater. There was nothing we could do for the whale but our job was to make sure that sightseers came to no harm. As it happened, the weather did that for us. It was a gloomy January morning and the conditions were awful. A westerly gale was lashing spray over the breakwater which mixed with the horizontal rain. A solitary policeman had already arrived at the pier and cut a lonely, forlorn figure as he held on to his hat and braced himself against the buffeting gusts.

 We parked on the pier near the harbour light. Bill stayed in the vehicle while John and I kitted up and joined the policeman in the howling gale. Fortunately there was a fisherman's hut there which was a convenient windbreak. Bill had been on the radio to the Coastguard control center at Fife Ness.

"We've to wait here till the whales pronounced dead."

"Whose going to do that?"

"Oh, that's up to a vet."

We all thought, correctly, that it would be a long day.

What for us was a cold, wet and windy vigil was transformed in the next days press into an exciting, multi agency rescue operation that, sadly, failed to save the whale.

"SSPCA officers and other specialists were called to Burntisland docks shortly after 8.30am after police received reports that a large whale was stranded in the water and appeared to be in distress.

Even as rescue operations began experts held little hope of saving the whale as it had not moved in some time, while the operation was significantly hampered by the strong winds and driving rain lashing the Fife coast.

After inspectors managed to examine the whale more closely it became apparent that the animal, which was partially submerged, was not breathing and had indeed died."

The Courier, Saturday, January 26th, 2008

Word of the whales grounding was obviously spreading as a few people from wild life groups and sanctuaries started to turn up, followed by a T.V. news team. The young woman journalist was decided underdressed for the conditions but interviewed a huge, bearded guy who was some sort of animal expert and reminded me of the comic strip character Desperate Dan. Another strange character arrived curiously undressed in what I eventually realised was a pink wet suite and asked if we'd go over to the breakwater and lower him with our cliff rescue gear onto the whale. Bill said NO. We only do that sort of thing if human life is in danger. He said he was a vet, but he was not THE VET. Sometime during the day one of the Briggs Marine barges went out and the crew tried to slip a rope round the whale, but failed. Later that afternoon the official vet arrived, glanced at the whale and immediately pronounced it dead. "Great!" I thought. "Now we can go home."

It must have been on the Sunday that I popped along to the docks again. I was curious to know what type of whale this was as identification had been impossible on the day as the creature was mostly submerged and the conditions were awful. Briggs Marine had by this time towed it into the east dock and I was able to stare down on this big, black hulk. There were no identifiable features so I was none the wiser. Someone else came along to look at it and we struck up a conversation. He seemed to know something about whales and said the scarring marks on the back of the whale suggested it was a sperm whale.

That's the last I saw of the creature, but I read the account of it's removal with great amusement in the Fife Free Press that Thursday. A great crane had been brought down from Aberdeen, a container lowered into the water and an attempt made to stuff the whale into the container. The whale, however, was too fat. An eye witness reported,

"There was no way they were going to get it in. It was disgusting to watch. The smell of the whale was so bad that people were gagging."

Then they tried hoisting the beast onto the dock but the slings were slack and the whale slipped out, fortunately falling into the water of the dock again.

Photos from the Fife Free Press, January 31st, 2008
The distinctive jaw of the Sperm Whale can be seen against 
the green and white stripes of the crane. 

 

Next day they tried again, but using tighter slings. This worked and the whale was taken away to a rendering plant in Moray for disposal.

So what kind of whale was it? The Fife Free Press  has it as a 15 foot Minke but it's as long as the forty foot trailer used to remove it. It was definitely a Sperm

Whale, although not full grown. The Moby Dicks of the planet can grow to 70 foot and 80 tonnes. This was all very sad that such a fine and rare creature, still young, should die in this way but it could have been worse, at least for us. It could have exploded. I watched a video once of a truck carrying a dead whale passing through a Korean village, at night. The whale exploded, breaking shop windows, overturning motorcycles and festooning the area with putrid guts. I leave you with that malodorous vision.

THE NORTHERN NINCOMPOOP A homage to L.S. Lowry

Homage to L.S. Lowry
Oil on board, 500mm x 425mm 2007/19

When I was a child we'd occasionally have holidays with my uncle Bill who lived in Manchester. This huge, industrial city was a bit of a shock to me. Although my uncle lived in the pleasant suburb of Urmston his chemist shop was in deepest Salford. This was a grimy, working class area full of cotton mills where the sky was a permanent, sulphurous yellow. Manchester was full of smoke blackened buildings, soaring chimneys and stagnant canals. When it rained (which it did, frequently) every drop contained a black nucleus of soot.

In 1959, when I was eleven years old, my parents took me to see the L.S. Lowry retrospective exhibition in the Manchester City Art Galleries. One work caught my attention. I gazed at it for ages and my parents had to drag me away. This was a simple depiction of a brick wall with a man lying on his back smoking a cigarette. His briefcase with the initials L.S.L. and an umbrella leaned against the wall. It seemed a crazy, comic, almost rebellious image.

Man lying on a wall, 1957

407mm x 509. The Lowry, Salford

This was the first one man show of oil paintings I had ever seen and did not know that Lowry was a controversial figure that did not fit into any convenient mould. He was dismissed by academic painters as being amateur or a naïve painter of matchstick men. The younger abstractionists who wanted to dehumanise painting hated the sight of his working class crowds. He was well aware of the snobbery of the art world and kept it a secret that he worked full time as a rent collector for a property company.

He wanted to go to art school but his parents couldn't afford the fees. As well as this his mother was permanently dismissive of his persistent attempts to be an artist. Lowery, however, did not let these circumstances stop him and attended evening classes for twenty years. He must have clocked up many more hours in the life class than full time students attending the professional course. Inevitably, his development was slow. The greatest influence on him was the life drawing tutor, the Frenchman Adolphe Valette. He was an impressionist who painted attractive, atmospheric views of Manchester with the eyes of an outsider. It must have seemed to Lowry that he too, could make something of the Manchester scene.

It wasn't till the late 1980's that I caught up with Lowry's work again. I had a print in an exhibition in Stirling and in the next room was an exhibition of Lowry's drawings.

I really didn't know what to expect but came away very impressed. By labouring for many years in the life class and sketching out of doors he became a master of pencil drawing. He was able to achieve tremendous atmosphere and sense of space, almost a sense of colour by using a soft pencil and smudging. He also worked on compositional drawings. In these we can see his distinctive style emerging. The background mills rise out of the murky gloom and groups of people pour out or assemble on the street. The figures are in a stiff, linear style without tone or shadows. They are not yet mature Lowry's, but the composition is there.

Why did Lowry paint his industrial scenes? Most artists of the era painted immediately attractive subjects like still lives or landscapes while Lowry's paintings of the early 1920's have titles like 'Pit Tragedy', 'The Funeral', 'The Removal', 'The Lodging House' and 'Sudden Illness.' Lowry liked to tell the story of how he had his vision. He had been plodding round Salford collecting rents for several years and was quit used to it, even blind to the place. One afternoon he just missed his train and the guard cheekily winked at him as it pulled away. This made him angry but as he waited a big cotton mill opened its gates and hundreds of workers poured out. He had seen this many times before but this was like seeing it for the first time. He saw the poetry, the strangeness, even absurdity and wanted to paint it.

One day a critic mentioned to him that he liked his work but thought it a bit dark and mucky. Lowry was annoyed  but determined to correct this. He experimented with a technique used by the Pre Raphaelites of painting into a wet, white ground. This became the key to his mature style. He was a great theatre goer and he used the line of a pavement or roofs of houses along the bottom of the picture which acted like the edge of a stage. The actors, sometimes great crowds, go through their ant like routines in front of the backdrop of factories, chimneys, polluted rivers and mean houses.

Lowry was lucky with his friends. After an exhibition in Manchester during 1921 (which sold nothing) he was invited to Sunday lunch by the director of the Oldham Art Gallery. His wife, Daisy Jewel, worked for a picture framing and art logistics company in London. She was able to place Lowry's work in exhibitions throughout the country and several times in Paris. His work was hardly ever selling but was at least being seen. Unfortunately his father died in 1932 leaving large debts which Lowry somehow managed to pay off. Worse was to follow. His hypochondriac mother took to her bed and remained there till her death seven years later. Lowry was at his wits end but Daisy's persistence finally payed off. In 1938 she learned that the company would receive a visit from one of the directors of London's most prestigious commercial galleries, Reid and Leferve. She knew how to bait a hook and left a few Lowry's lying about. He loved the work and offered Lowry a one man show in 1939. Sixteen of the twenty paintings sold.

This was a tremendous boosts for Lowry and he was offered another exhibition in two years time. This was not to be. A failed artist in Germany embarked on the invasion of Europe and the gallery shut up shop for the duration. Lowry continued to paint, plod around Salford collecting rents and at night take his turn at fire watching. Manchester was badly bombed and in 1943 he was awarded some recognition by being created an official war artist.

In the 1940's and 50's his paintings are often larger and more panoramic. He looks down on great swathes of industrial city with the population scurrying about in the foreground. He still had a wide range of ingredients but was beginning to repeat himself. He admitted that his heart was no longer in these big scenes and concentrated on what he called his 'grotesques', unusual characters or groups of figures with only minimal background. Some of these are quite startling.

 His world too, had changed dramatically. The Salford he knew in the 1920's and 30's had either been bombed or swept away by the developers and replaced by high rise flats and motorways. By then, however, the recognition he craved had begun to come. He was awarded various academic distinctions and different British governments showered him with honors, including a knighthood, which he always refused. His main concern in his later years was "Will I live?" That is, would his work survive after his death and still be recognized and critically acclaimed. He needn't have worried for In reality he had become one of Britain's most popular artists. His graphic technique made excellent reproductions and these satisfied an upsurge of nostalgia for a world that was being swept away. After old Salford had been demolished a new art center was constructed called 'The Lowry', with theatres and a gallery containing many Lowry paintings. 

As for the snobbish art world, the critics are still divided. In 2014, thirty eight years after his death, the Tate Gallery in London held a major Lowry exhibition. The outspoken art critic Brian Sewel hated Lowry's work, (including everything north of the Thames) and had previously called Lowry a nincompoop. To be fair, he saw his job as a critic was to attack artists and burst their overblown bubble of reputation. He dismissed Lowry's paintings as being inept, tedious, repetitive, lackluster, and stuck in a rut. Some of this may be fair, but most of his tirade was directed not at Lowry or the paintings but at the two, unfortunate curators of the exhibition who knew nothing about Lowry and also the  blossoming nostalgia cult that had grown up around Lowry's paintings. The art market has no such reservations. Humble lithographic reproductions sell for thousands of pounds and in 2011 the Lowry painting of Piccadilly Circus sold for five million pounds. Lowry would have split his sides laughing if he'd lived to witness that. Not bad for a northern nincompoop!

Douglas Gray, woodcut, 2009
32 x 23 cms.