Alasdair Gray, the Scottish writer and artist, has died. While best known for his debut novel Lanark (1981), which was written over almost 30 years, and Poor Things (1992) which scooped both the Whitbread Novel Award and Guardian Fiction Prize, Grey trained as a muralist and continued to paint and draw throughout his career, including illustrating his own books. A 2014 retrospective at Glasgow’s Kelingrove museum charted his work as an artist from graduating the Glasgow School of Art in 1957, to his work in the late 1970s as a ‘city recorder’ and murals for Glasgow’s Hillhead subway station and Òran Mór, an arts and music venue.
In 1977, the curator Elispeth King became concerned that the city didn’t have any contemporary artworks depicting Glasgow’s people and places. Gray was therefore appointed the city’s ‘artist recorder’, producing around around 33 works depicting Glaswegians going about their daily lives, as well as the city’s architecture and street life.
Gray’s work is held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the National Library of Scotland, the Hunterian Museum, and the Arts Council of England collection.
Speaking to the New Yorker in 2015 about his better known career as a novelist, the critic Gavin Miller said that Gray, ‘played a central role during the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties in reimagining literary Glasgow, and largely bypassing all those tired clichés of gangs, hard men, and knife violence. He did this while also resisting some of the very anodyne narratives that emerged as Glasgow ‘regenerated’ under neoliberalism.’
29 December 2019
