On eBay I have an alert set for ‘Scottie Wilson’. Nine times out of ten, it’s a diamanté Scottie dog from the jewellers Butler & Wilson. Once in a while, it’s a gem.
Scottie Wilson didn’t think much of journalists. Art critics were ‘just jugglers — dodgers’. The sort of people who went to art shows — his or anybody else’s — could be counted on to go about ‘blabbing a lot of stupid muck. A lot of blah blah. They get paid for it too!’ Which makes it tricky to write about Scottie (always Scottie, never Wilson). You just know he’d light a cigarette and scowl.
I came late to Scottie. I thought I was good on artists between the wars, but I’d never come across Scottie or his works until I spotted — and instantly coveted — one of his Royal Worcester plates on a curator’s kitchen dresser. Since then, I’ve been on the scout for Scottie, on eBay and elsewhere.
His work doesn’t spring from the imagination so much as crawl out from under the bed
Scottie has been called a ‘primitive’ or an ‘outsider’ artist. Hopeless terms, really. Ragged nets to catch a lot of queer fish. Maori bushmen are primitive, Henri ‘Douanier’ Rousseau is primitive, African carvings are primitive, the paintings at Lascaux are primitive, Alfred Wallis is primitive. All it means is: didn’t go to school, or didn’t go to the right school, or didn’t get into the salon, or didn’t play the game.
If Alfred Wallis is better known than Scottie it is partly down to famous friends — Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Barbara Hepworth — and partly a case of having a good haul of his works in one place and out on display at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge.
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