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.
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