Douglas Grierson – weaver, artist
Born March 16, 1946; died September 17, 2019
Douglas Grierson, who has died aged 73, was a weaver
of distinction, whose flair with colour was imprinted with his own personality.
His dedication to his craft made him a key figure at Edinburgh’s Dovecot
Studios, where he was head weaver for a decade after overseeing the centre’s
opening in the former Infirmary Street baths. This followed the closure of the
Corstorphine-based Edinburgh Tapestry Company, where Grierson began an as an
apprentice weaver aged fifteen, working there right up to the move.
Grierson grew to become an elder statesman of his
craft, whose wisdom rubbed off both on younger weavers and what looks like a
roll-call of major contemporary artists he worked alongside. Elizabeth
Blackadder, David Hockney, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ian Hamilton Finlay and a myriad
of others all passed through a sphere that saw Grierson suitably unimpressed
with anything resembling celebrity.
While Grierson made and exhibited his own work, he
largely played down his own efforts, and was in essence a collaborator. This
was the case too in Grierson’s life outside the studio, where the social aspects
of everyday relationships fostered a living tapestry of connections with family
and friends that will remain as vital a part of his legacy as anything created
at the loom.
Douglas William Alexander Grierson was born in
Portobello, Edinburgh, the eldest of four children to his mother May, who
worked in trade union offices, and his father Bill, a carpenter. The couple set
up home in Portobello, where Douglas, his sister Wilma and brothers Colin and
Andy were raised.
Exposure to music, film and art left their mark while
growing up. Even though Grierson hated art classes at St Anthony’s school in
Leith, where lessons were more about disciplining working class boys for a
lifetime on building sites, he would spend his dinner money on art materials.
He was offered jobs as a trainee pottery designer and a stained glass
apprentice as well as the post at Edinburgh Tapestry Company. He accepted the
latter, trusting his instincts, despite never having heard of tapestry.
As Grierson wrote later in The Art of Modern Tapestry
– Dovecot Studios Since 1912, ‘there was something interesting and unique about
the place, that was intriguing, that gave me the gut feeling this would be a
good place to work, with no consideration to where it would lead.’
Grierson began his career as an apprentice weaver in
1961, the day after his fifteenth birthday. At night classes at Edinburgh College
of Art, he studied tapestry, drawing and printed textiles. To suggest such
experiences opened his mind and eyes to a hitherto unknown world of
possibilities is an understatement.
‘It was probably the first time I had come into close
contact with an abstract piece of work, and I was so impressed,’ Grierson wrote.
‘The colours of reds and gold were set against the gloomy interior of the studio,
the washed floorboards, the brown cork walls and the evenness of the north
light. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.’
After seven years working six days a week, Grierson
became a master weaver. Towards the end of his apprenticeship, he met an
Edinburgh College of Art student named Fiona Mathison, who worked in the
original Dovecot outwith term time before moving to London to take her master’s
degree at the Royal College of Art.
During Mathison’s final year, Grierson travelled to
London to help her finish a tapestry for an international exhibition. They married
in 1973 at an Edinburgh registry office, moving first into a room and kitchen
off London Road, then a flat overlooking Leith Links. In 1978, Douglas and
Fiona’s son Sandy was born. Growing up immersed in art of all kinds, Sandy
became an actor, working extensively in Scottish theatre.
Grierson went on to work on many large scale public tapestries,
including ones at the City Chambers in Glasgow, the British Library and the
National Museum of Scotland. He worked closely with numerous other artists,
relishing the relationship between artist and weaver, where informal chats about colours,
shapes and tones were as vital as talk of music and ideas.
This was evident in Grierson’s favourite tapestry, To
A Celtic Spirit, taken from a print by Alan Davie, and which now hangs at
Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary. Grierson described the experience of making it as
‘one of the most joyous experiences in my weaving life ... Collaboration is an
overused term these days, but in this case it is entirely appropriate. There
are only a handful of artists that truly see their tapestry as part of their
own work, and Alan Davie was one.’
Appointed studio manager of Dovecot in 1994, Grierson
introduced gun tufting, a technology that was faster and cheaper than tapestry
weaving, but which also channelled the artistic skills, experience and
understanding of the weaver to create tufted rugs.
After Edinburgh Tapestry Company closed in 2000, the
opening of the new Dovecot a year later saw Grierson appointed head weaver,
allowing him to set down the importance of the relationship between weaver and
artist in a way that remains at the heart of the centre’s aesthetic philosophy
today following Grierson’s retirement in 2011.
Grierson travelled widely, both for business and
pleasure. Accompanying Mathison for work, there were trips to Japan, and a jazz
pilgrimage to Harlem in New York. In 2003, he and his weaving represented Scotland
at the Smithsonian Institute’s Cultural Festival on Washington Mall.
While a request from the British Library to
interview Grierson for their National Life Stories collection went sadly
unfulfilled, an old Ian Hamilton Finlay PROEM tapestry looks set to be shown at
St Andrew’s Museum, and a recent work – Boxing – is currently on show at Miniartextil,
a major annual international exhibition of textile art held in Como in
Lombardy, Italy. The tapestry of Grierson’s life, it seems, goes on in every way.
Grierson is survived by
his wife, Fiona Mathison, his son Sandy and his wife Leah, and two
grand-children, Susi and Innes.
The Herald, October 10th 2019
ends
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