My eldest daughter and her family are moving from a three-bedroom Art Deco semi with a garden and garage on the edge of a housing scheme to a top-floor tenement flat in a trendy family orientated area of Glasgow. They’re having to increase their mortgage to do so but think that the benefits to their overall quality of life will be worth it, and if they move to my son-in-law’s native Como for a while, the flat will be easy to rent out.
Surveying the contents of the garage, she messaged: ‘What shall I do with your big portrait, Mum?’ When I was young I was painted quite often, mostly by my artist ex, because I was there and didn’t mind modelling for him. One of these, a back view of me glancing over my shoulder at the viewer, prompted a visiting national newspaper owner to say to my then husband: ‘Your wife is a very sexy woman…’ When my midwife pal Hilary’s husband saw it he said: ‘Who’s getting the dirty look then?’ ‘Probably you Gordon…’ ‘Aye, right enough…’
But this wasn’t the portrait in question. The painting in the garage was the result of an arrangement in the early 2000s between a portrait-artist friend and my ex. She painted me and he modelled and cast a bust of her. For the painting I was seated in the corner of the dining room beside the fire, a picture of my father in the background, three roses on the mantel shelf representing my daughters and a book in my hands.
I would have preferred a smaller work but the artist worked on a large scale and, framed, it measured 4ft 4in x 3ft 2in.
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