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.

                  

  

 

THE SHELTER STONE. A sad ballad from a distant land.

The Shelter Stone

Mixed media on paper

38 x 56 cms. 2016

 

In my youth the Shelter Stone had a fabled reputation. It was the one place that young, aspirant mountaineers wanted to spend at least one night under. Situated in the center of the Cairngorms, between the massive bulks of Cairngorm and Ben Macdui, it was considered remote. To reach it from any direction required a long walk.

With the construction of high car parks and ski lifts in the northern corrie of Cairngorm, all this changed. As the story below relates, you could jump on a chairlift, walk up to the summit of Cairngorm and down to the Shelter Stone in an afternoon.

The drawing was made in 2016. I spent the night at Bob Scotts then walked in to the Shelter Stone carrying only my sketching kit and a light load. Although it was late May it was still cool with melting snow drifts at Loch Etchacan.

 The trip related below happened in the 1980's, when I was living in Edinburgh. Neither my pal or I had a car so we took the bus to Aviemore then the local service up to the ski slopes. As is often the case, wild weather trips are often the most memorable.

A SAD BALLAD FROM A DISTANT LAND

I must admit, we cheated. The car parks were deserted but the chair lift was running so we jumped on that. Back in Edinburgh I'd said to Ronnie,

"May is a wonderfully dry month with great, long days to wander in the Cairngorms."

Some hope. The rain  was torrential. We disappeared into the clouds rattling and swinging, clutching our packs with frozen hands and screwing our eyes up against the stinging rain. This was no pleasure. The Ptarmigan café at the top of the lift was a damp, miserable bunker where we huddled for a while, waiting for the rain to pass, but it didn't. All we could do was grit our teeth and plod on to the summit. Things could only get better.

We dropped down on a bearing to Corrie Raibert across big, soggy snow fields. Lower down I noticed we had company as two figures appeared out of the mist, walking on a converging course. As they drew closer I could see one had long hair and a beard with, rather oddly, a red air horn strapped to the back of his rucksack. His friend never said much and seemed cold, droukit and dead beat. Their destination was the same as ours, the Shelter Stone.

This well known howff was frustratingly close, but getting there was another matter. It lay on the other side of the wild Feith Bhuidhe. This burn was in full spate, with the normal ford impassible. I suggested walking up the hill to find another crossing but had to stop where it thundered out from under a snow field. The bearded one, lets call him Steve, wanted to cross the snow, until I pointed out the penalty for going through a rotten snow bridge, into the burn was certain death. It wasn't worth it. Instead, we retraced our steps to where the burn spread out and entered Loch Avon and splashed through the shallows there. As we looked at the ground any thought of camping was finally abandoned. Every flat spot was under water which gurgled and burbled from every crack and orifice. A night under the Shelter Stone seemed suddenly appealing.

Comfort is always relative and initially, just to get out of the wind and rain was comfort enough. As our eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, however, we could see that our accommodation was damp, dark and scattered with rubbish. Steve's friend, I'll call him Dave, immediately crawled into his sleeping bag at the back of the cave. He was not happy. I couldn't help quizzing Steve about his red air horn.

"I carry it in case we get lost. It's very loud."

They'd camped near the summit of Cairngorm in wet and windy conditions. His pall had been on the windward side of the tent and the rain had sprayed through and soaked everything he had. They hadn't slept a wink.

I was cooking up rice and tins of beef chili for our meal while Steve lit his petrol stove, pulled out a bag of flour and began making chapattis. I'd never seen anyone doing this before, especially under a boulder. He was a vegetarian and appalled at our diet. He didn't actually say that we were 'polluting our temples' but that's what he meant. As a greasy omnivore I defended myself as best I could and one of the usual arguments ensued between meat eaters and vegetarians, too boring to relate here. His feelings were deeply felt, for the more agitated he became the quicker his hands flew, working the chapattis, which incidentally, were delicious. His ideal was a world where everyone lived off the food they grew on their own land.

"Have you got a bit of land?" I asked.

"No!"

Making chapattis under a boulder
Pencil and watercolour

After eating I pulled out the whisky and offered everyone a dram. Dave seemed to cheer up a little and actually smiled, before returning to his slumbers.

 In the increasing darkness, illuminated by a flickering candle, Steve told us a story from his life. He was married and lived in a town in the English Midlands. One day his wife went out and never came back. Her parents grew concerned and contacted the police. He was taken in and interrogated, but released. One  day the police descended on his house with a warrant and started ripping up the floorboards, then dug up the garden. They found nothing. With no evidence of a crime he was never charged. One day he was walking up the street when he bumped into two of the detectives that had been involved in the case. Harsh words were exchanged and then punches. They gave him a good kicking and left him lying on the pavement. After this he decided to put as much distance as he could between himself and his past and flitted to Orkney. Now you may ask, was I not concerned about spending a night with someone who may have been a murderer? In the circumstances his story was like a sad ballad from a distant land and anyway, I was too busy just trying to keep warm.

My sleeping position was next to the entrance and a howling gale blew in. The polythene that someone had rigged as a door was flapping about and useless so I stuffed a couple of rucksacks in the gap to cut out the draught. Then, as it grew totally dark we were disturbed by loud rustlings and rummaging as a regiment of mice moved in, trying to carry off Steve's chapatti flour. Intermittent hostilities continued for a couple of hours, until they grew tired of the game and marched off with band playing.

It would be nice to relate that the dawn was bright and clear, but when we looked out the wind was even stronger and the rain lashed down. Neither Ronnie or I had the stomach to traverse the high tops in these conditions, so implemented Plan B. Leaving the others still sleeping we headed for Ryvoan bothy by crossing the Saddle and sloshing down gloomy Strata Nethy. 

About lunch time we arrived at Bynack Stable, an old corrugated shed with a stall for a pony. It was great to get out of the weather and we soon had the Primus going. Another walker arrived, then another and another. We were standing chatting and passing round biscuits when a big, fit looking guy with an enormous rucksack barged in. It's amazing how much you can learn about complete strangers in these situations. Apparently he'd divorced six years ago and since then walked across Scotland six times and run thirty six marathons. I was impressed.

"Here, have a nice cup of tea. It may help calm you down a bit."

JOHN BELLANY AT WORLDS END

John Bellany at Worlds End.
Oil on canvas

By 1975 I had been living in London for five years but never bumped into John Bellany. That summer my pall John Kirkwood came to stay for a few days and suggested we pay him a visit. He knew John and also where to find him. I have this memory of walking across a huge flat area of crushed red brick, with the twin chimneys of Lots Road power station belching steam in the background. In the Bible it was Lot's wife who looked behind and was turned into a pillar of salt. There were no pillars of salt here but we were at a place called Worlds End that looked like it had been cleared by a nuclear explosion. The demolishers had left part of a row of what were called 'artisan dwellings'. These were two story, red brick buildings with very small rooms. We made a bee line for the very end one which I thought was derelict. The door was open so we shouted and went in. We squeezed past a large canvas covered with slashing brush strokes and climbed the stairs.

John Bellany was talking to a young woman who was just leaving and he welcomed us in. The two Johns did most of the talking. I didn't know much about him except that he'd been a star at Edinburgh College of Art and at the Royal College in London from 1965 - 1968. He had a reputation of being a brilliant painter but as I'd seen little or any of his work I was still to be convinced. He sat slumped in an old armchair wearing a fashionable, but ludicrous patchwork denim suit.

"Well," I thought, "This guy fancies himself as a dandy." Then I looked at all the pictures on the wall behind him. Little portraits, fishing boats and harbours, probably done when he was at college in Edinburgh. They definitely had something, almost a folksy naivety which I liked. These, I knew were not his best or recent work but personal things he'd kept. All this seemed to fit in with the sartorial absurdity of the denim suit - he was a showman.

In the painting I included an accordion lying at the side of his chair. I can't remember if it was there or not but he was a good musician and singer. During his time in Edinburgh he played in a band called the Blue Bonnets. In the film his son made of Bellany's life there is a piece of blurry, black and white film of him moving between the tables in a pub, playing the accordion and singing the 'Road and miles to Dundee.' He was a natural entertainer with a good voice who sang with feeling.

Bellany suggested we went to an Irish pub that had good music. I imagined it would be a raucous bar packed with hairy Irishmen swilling Guinness. Nothing could be further from the truth. This was very much a family bar, everyone sitting at tables and no bad language. At closing time the band played the Irish national anthem and they all stood up. We did not attract attention to ourselves by remaining seated!

Sadly, I thought that Bellany was only half the character I'd expected him to be. He was reputed to be the life and soul of the party but seemed to me quiet, distanced and preoccupied.

Of course, I had no idea of what was going on in his personal life. Earlier that year he had split up from his wife, Helen and their three kids. This provoked a nervous breakdown and he hadn't long returned from Edinburgh where he had fled to recover. When I met him he was still the the depths of a dark depression.

 

THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE FISHWIFE

 

Oil on board, 51cms x 61cms. 2021

 While reading a book about the Scottish Enlightenment I came across an amusing account of an accident that happened to the famous philosopher, David Hume(1711-1776) which he related in a letter to a friend. By this time in his life he was not only a philosopher but a highly regarded historian and his books were read all over Europe. By never marrying and careful budgeting he had managed to amass a modest fortune of one thousand pounds a year, which in those times was enough to keep him in considerable opulence. He was affable, courteous and amusing, so much so that his smiling corpulence was seen as a decoration to all the best dinner tables. The fact that most of Scotland regarded Hume as a shocking atheist was passed over by those that knew and loved him, for if he was an atheist, he wore it lightly.

As a symbol of his affluence he purchased a house in the brand new St. Andrews Square. To get there from the old town, where most of his socialising still took place, was not easy. Edinburgh is a place of crags, ravines and valleys and the great north bridge connecting the black, stinking old town to the new St Andrews Square was yet to be completed. The North Loch had been drained but left a stinking bog polluted by the effluent from tanneries, butchers shambles and the night soil emptied into the numerous closes. Only a narrow path, created by custom and practice, made it's way across this fetid swamp.

The sun had sunk well below the western hills by the time Hume had made his fond good byes and set out carefully across the narrow track. Somewhere along the path he stumbled, or more likely after too much claret, staggered. The stagger became a slide and his body had a hard time keeping up with his legs, which ended thigh deep in the obnoxious mud. He stood there for a moment, swaying and trying to catch his breath. He was glad not to have gone in head first, but every time he tried to move his feet were sucked further into the mud. Night was falling and there was no one about. What was he to do? He needed help to get out of the bog and started shouting "HELP! HELP!" No answer. He had been stranded there for some time when a strange, humped back figure shuffled out of the gloom. As it grew closer he realised with relief that it was a fishwife with her wicker creel on her back.

"Madam! Madam! Oh dear, kind fishwife, please help me out."

Her look of surprise turned to one of contempt.

"I ken you! You're Davy Hume, the infidel. Whit wad I help you for?"

"Madam. Madam, I'm a poor lost soul stuck in the mud. Is it not your Christian duty to help those in distress?

She thought on this.

"Weel, that's true. I'll help ye if you recite the Lords Prayer and the Apostolic Creed."

As it happened, Hume had been brought up in a deeply religious family, which probably initiated  his contempt for religion. He took a deep breath and regurgitated what he  regarded as mumbo-jumbo word perfect and even with commendable feeling. 

He limped and dragged himself up the slope to St Andrews Square. His feet hurt on the sharp, unfinished road as he had lost his shoes to the bog. His fine, silken hose dragged round his ankles encrusted with disgusting filth and his best white breeches were ruined. Fortunately, no one of 'quality' witnessed his passing. Only an old soldier employed as a night watchman on the building site looked up from his blazing fire and touched his bonnet as a sign of respect. 

"A braw nicht for a walk Sur."

Then he turned and stared into the fire. He had seen much stranger and more terrible sights in the shambles of battle.

Etching by John Kay,1742-1826, 

ENLIGHTENMENT

Enlightenment

Oil on canvas, 61cms.x 81cms.

Does your head glow in the dark? Probably not! But the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were brilliant luminaries. They had no need for caddies carrying a lantern to lead them up the dark, stinking closes of Auld Reekie to their favourite taverns. They just thought great thoughts and illuminated the World.

Are you enlightened? I suppose most people think they are, which only proves that 'enlightenment' means different things to different people. To eastern religions it signifies a spiritual awakening and oneness with the world, but to westerners 'the Enlightenment' means a specific period in the 18th century. For various reasons many Europeans began to question the old certainties and look at how people actually, rather than ideally, thought and behaved. They also began to apply this to  the natural world and scientific investigation began to expand. It was an attitude of mind that encouraged individuals to think for themselves and question everything. In short, they invented the world in which we live today.

So, I was plagued by a vision of members of the Scottish Enlightenment going about their business with heads glowing like brilliant lanterns. This seemed immensely silly and I had to unload this burden somehow. What if I gave a glowing head to Henry Raeburn's popular but very silly portrait of the Reverend Walker skating?

The Rev. Robert Walker skating
By Sir Henry Raeburn
National Galleries of Scotland

 

There was a precedence for this. I remembered the painting

by Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte, 'The Pleasure Principal'. In this, an anonymous male figure sits at a table with his head obscured in a great blaze of light.

I bought a small reproduction of the 'Skater' from the Scottish National Galleries shop and started to copy it. Very soon I realised that I did not want to paint a sub Raeburn but a genuine Gray. I turned the figure round so it was heading towards the viewer and introduced Edinburgh, the Firth of Forth and Fife with the Lomond Hills in the background.

  

At first the figures head was hidden by a brilliant glow, but found this unsatisfactory and painted in the Rev. Walkers head. This I found boring, then thought, "Aha! I'll change it to a woman" I rounded out the sharper angles of the figure. Then, "why not a woman of colour?" If a woman of colour had been a skating minister of the Kirk of Scotland in the 1760's, that would have been enlightenment indeed.