To
enter into Alasdair Gray’s world is to enter a wonderland of imagination that
bursts off the page, canvas and stage to offer possibilities of other ways of
living rooted in the big, messy bloom of humanity. Gray’s passing aged 85 is
the loss of an artistic titan, whose breadth of vision in word, brush and
thought helped reimagine infinity for the city of Glasgow and its people that became
his canvas, his story-board and his dream-scape.
You
could get a glimpse of that world stepping into Gray’s home in the west end of
the city, where paintings of his literary and artistic contemporaries and of those
close to him down the decades lined his front room. The acquired clutter suggested
a life that was an endless work in progress, its expansive Blakeian shades
reaching out for the stars, the universe and beyond.
I
fleetingly witnessed this first-hand when I visited Gray to interview him and
artist Siobhan Healy about their forthcoming exhibition, Biodiversity: A
Cabinet of Curiosities, which they were working on for the 2018 Edinburgh Art
Festival. Gray was painstakingly painting the texts for the show when I
arrived. He was in a wheelchair by then following a fall a few years earlier,
but spoke as passionately and as forensically about the Patrick Geddes inspired
show as he did a decade or so before when I’d visited. That was to interview
him about a play he had going on as part of Oran Mor’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint
lunchtime theatre season.
The
word ‘interview’ doesn’t really do the experience justice. An audience with
Gray was to tune in to an ebullient stream of conscious that would back-flip
between tangents of classical literature, art and world affairs, often in the
same sentence as his voice rose in volume before punctuating things with
shrieks of laughter. The presence of Gray’s now late wife Morag McAlpine
sitting quietly reading the paper the whole time made the meeting even more
disarming. Each discursive, mind-boggling ramble by Gray took several by-roads
to get to every brilliant point, but like the great polymath’s multi-faceted
means of expression, it all connected up.
For
those who came to Lanark, Unlikely Stories Mostly, The Fall of Kelvin Walker and
Gray’s other books at a formative age, that inquisitiveness was rewarded with
mind-expanding largesse that was rooted in the classics but looked squarely
towards unchartered futures. The drawings, typography and footnotes that
peppered the pages took the reader somewhere else again. This wasn’t just
literature. This was a portal into a new way of thinking and a new way of being
that the Gray-penned storyboard for a projected film of Lanark, serialised like
a cartoon strip in Scottish Book Collector magazine throughout the 1980s, could
only hint at.
For
those who walk past Gray’s mural on Hillhead Underground every day, or stare up
at the ceiling of Oran Mor on the corner of Byres Road and Great Western Road, it
is the same. Gray’s work may be rooted in the everyday to the extent that its public
presence might be taken for granted by those in a hurry. But stop a moment in
the midst of your commute or your Friday night pint to look up and breathe in
an alchemist’s brew of craftsmanship and metaphysics, and something bigger than
all of us peers back. Each painting maps out all the heroic struggles of life
contained in a huge body of work that is both deeply political and deeply
spiritual.
The all-encompassing
power of Gray’s canon could be gleaned a few years back from the tellingly
named Spheres of Influence twin exhibitions that ran in tandem at Glasgow School
of Art and the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. These were lovingly curated by
Sorcha Dallas Gray, a key figure in keeping Gray’s visual flame in view, and
unfurled a cross-generational array of classical and contemporary artists
bridged by Gray’s mighty reach.
It’s there
too in Gray’s stage works, in both original plays and adaptations of novels. Lanark
has been staged twice so far, both times at Edinburgh International Festival,
with the most recent in 2015 again bringing together a plethora of talents
sired whether consciously or otherwise by Gray’s towering presence.
As a
latter-day renaissance man and everyday genius, Gray is untouchable. To have
had him on our doorstep has been something to cherish. Looking at the proud but
bewildered face of the shy, tank-topped young artist in Oscar Marzaroli’s
portrait of Gray in the 1950s showing as part of the current exhibition of
Marzaroli’s work at Street Level is to get a glimpse of a reluctant visionary
in waiting. Who would have guessed the torrent of wisdom and experience that
would burst forth to enrich the soul beyond?
The List, December 2019
ends
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