Sorcha Dallas

The Two Alasdairs; its an intriguing title for an exhibition featuring work by Alasdair Gray. It could easily refer to Gray’s twin-track career as novelist and artist, but in fact there really are two Alasdairs. The second is Alasdair Taylor, Gray’s friend and art school contemporary who died of a stroke in 2007 and whose reputation Gray wants to raise up to whatever lofty heights dead Scottish painters can ascend in these times. He’s joined in that project by James Kelman and a few others. So if Alasdair Gray is the draw – or the bait, if you like - it’s Alasdair Taylor who’s the real focus.

Stylistically and temperamentally the two men couldn’t be more different. Gray is an avuncular city-dweller whose figurative Glasgow streetscapes have made him one of the city’s best-loved artists. Taylor lived as a semi-recluse first in Denmark and then in Portencross in North Ayrshire, and produced large abstract canvases rich in mood and colour but – at least on the basis of the few shown here – shot through with a gloomy mysticism. They are powerful, though, and that’s the point.

In terms of the work, the exhibition has to obvious means of connection: a pen and ink drawing of the two Alasdairs, executed by Gray in 1995; and a 1964 painting, also by Gray, of Taylor and his Danish wife Annalise in the kitchen of their house at 158 Hill Street, Glasgow.

From there it diverges. Gray’s selection includes some wonderful Glasgow scenes, including his beautiful 1977 tinted ink drawing ‘London Road Between Templeton’s Carpet Factory And Monaco Bar’, and his somber 1964 work, ‘Cowcaddens in the Fifties’. A sketchbook customized from an old accounts ledger shows preparatory sketches for that painting, including a clipping from a newspaper of three teddy boys strutting down a Glasgow street. The same three van be seen in the painting and, in a detail Gray would enjoy, they find a modern day echo on the day I visit: a bequiffed art school poseur in teddy boy jacket, turned-up jeans and Cuban heels who stops to admire the work.

As well as the abstracts, Taylor’s side of the show features a suite of eight text-based collages from 1970, a series of painted stones, a textured self-portrait in oils and a video playing a BBC Scotland interview from 1974. There is more in a lock-up in North Ayrshire, just waiting to see the light of day.

It could be a late dawn for Alasdair Taylor, but it will be a welcome one.