by Dominic Cullen

In Book Two of his novel Lanark, Alasdair Gray recounts this conversation between Kenneth McAlpin and Duncan Thaw.

‘Glasgow is a magnificent city’ said McAlpin. ‘Why do we hardly ever notice that?’

‘Because nobody imagines living here’ said Thaw…

‘Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because they have already visited those places in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively’.

The idea that you can live somewhere imaginatively has always resonated with me.

When I was 17 years old I enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art, and from the outset I felt privileged to have the opportunity to study there. The stone steps up to the Mackintosh Building, the battered wooden swing doors and the pigment-spattered studios smelling of oil paints and stale spirits were all genuinely thrilling. There were mock-classical sculptures in the corridors, paintings and murals on the walls and all sorts of interesting and outlandish looking people wandering about. It was a wonderful place to learn and also a place where examples of expression and creativity were all around.

By this point I was in the third year of my studies, painting was central to my work and it was still firmly based in Glasgow. Then came a departmental field trip to North Uist. A group of twelve students squeezed into the school’s old Ford Transit van and we set off for a week of painting in the Hebrides, undisturbed by the outside world. It was a revelation for me, working in the landscape with nothing else to do every day but paint.

One of the exercises we did was night painting, when we were woken from our beds and bundled into the back of the van without much explanation. We were then deposited, one at a time, at isolated spots around the island. I was left alone in the darkness with some paper, paints and oil pastels and so I got to work. After a while the van returned, took us home and we went back to our beds. In the morning the students gathered together to have a look at our collective efforts in the light of day. Abstract would be a kind description of the work, it is quite difficult to paint in the dark, but some of it actually made sense. The practice of working at night precludes any presumed or habitual use of otherwise familiar materials. This results in a fresh, lucid process, and some unexpected combinations of line and colour. The rest of the time on Uist we painted during the daylight hours but the lessons informed my work when I got back to Glasgow.

After I graduated from the GSA I worked as a freelance designer and artist for a while then settled into a job. I still kept sketchbooks and joined the Glasgow Print Studio to continue working creatively, but this was mostly restricted to evenings and weekends at the workshop. Then in November 2007 I went to see a Joan Eardley retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery and was inspired. It was a wonderful exhibition, a masterclass in painting full of life and colour and imagination. It was also a timely reminder of what I had been missing and I made a decision to start painting again.

The following year I had a very modest pop-up exhibition at the 13th Note on King Street. Ten paintings of Glasgow, and not all of them very good. But it reignited something, and I started seeing compositions in the streets and tenements that I hadn’t thought about for years. I showed some more Glasgow paintings at a gallery on the Broomielaw then decided to take a break from the city and hired a cottage in Montrose for a week. It felt a bit like the Uist trip when I was a student, painting all day every day, and whilst I was there I paid my first visit to Catterline, the wee fishing village where Joan Eardley lived and worked for a big part of her life. It’s a beautiful place.