Press

There is only one Alasdair Gray, who is fast becoming a national treasure. A writer and artist of astonishing originality, he is finally being feted for his output over the last 50 years.

There was also only one Alasdair Taylor, Gray’s friend for five decades. The pair met at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) in the 1950s and formed a connection which lasted until Taylor’s death in 2007.

Unlike Gray, who is a familiar figure to anyone who knows the west end of Glasgow, Taylor’s life passed with only a few people outside a close group of artist friends realising the genius which touched it. He spent most of his working life in a isolated cottage in the shadow of Hunterston B Nuclear Power station in North Ayrshire. Supported by his Danish wife Annelise, who bought art supplies with spare cash from her job as a community worker, Taylor was prolific – on his death, a great deal of work was found crammed into a garage.

Both men are difficult to pigeonhole, though each can be labeled a polymath. The bulk of Taylor’s work lay in visual mediums, but he also wrote fiction, poetry and short stories.

His art-school training in drawing and composition remained a constant in his art, but as noted in an essay for this exhibition’s catalogue by his friend Malcolm Dickson, director of Glasgow’s Street Level gallery, “it is in the abstract expressionist work that a freedom of colour and form is embraced”.

Heavily influenced by European Situationist movement Cobra, which advocated complete freedom of colour and form while rejecting surrealism, Taylor was also inspired by the artists John Houston and Asger Jorn.

This exhibition contains a small selection from the vast amount of work he produced in his Portencross studio. According to Grainne Rice, exhibitions officer at GSA, this exhibition came about after Gray wrote to his alma mater to recommend they stage an exhibition of his friend’s work. “We were already talking to Alasdair about putting on an exhibition of his work and it tied in with the direction we are taking of how we present the school through the artists who have studied here,” she says.

“We are focusing on one strand of Alasdair Gray’s work, namely his treatment and use of the city of Glasgow and the Scottish landscape, the people in and their relationship with the environment. We have five pieces from Glasgow Museum’s collection which haven’t been seen for years and they are just wonderful.”

The two artists’ work may, at first glance seem to be very different, but it is their non-conformist, genius-speckled approach to life and more particularly, their art, which links them together.