Taking a firm line

This book collects nearly 300 examples of Alasdair Gray’s work as a painter and illustrator.

This book collects nearly 300 examples of Alasdair Gray’s work as a painter and illustrator. As an art student in 1950s Glasgow, he scorned the conservatism of tutors who painted the way ‘Monet might have painted had he been timid and Scottish, with an inferior grasp of colour and design’. Instead of traditional still lifes and landscapes, he produced devious biblical scenes populated with weird and sinewy figures inspired by Blake, Breughel and Bosch. Gray remarks that his mother’s death when he was 17 gave him a horrified fascination — further fuelled by his eczema — with ‘bones, nerves, veins, glands… [the] muscular and connective tissues that amount to a human being’. A lecturer asked if he ‘needed to make people look ugly and tortured’.

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Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

That description hardly applies to the work that Gray went on to produce after his degree.