A poignant epitaph to Alasdair Gray

In the early 1980s, I edited a poetry broadsheet with the writer Duncan McLean, which we named Clanjamfrie. We were young students and wanted to reflect some of the excitement around Scottish art and writing. We wrote to Alasdair Gray asking for a contribution and received a selection of poem-prints and an (unsolicited) cheque for £50. Gray’s novel, Lanark, had recently been published and we were astonished to receive support from such a famous author.

We did not know it then, but such generosity was entirely typical of the man. His kindness and humanity were well-known and even if he went on to achieve international fame, his modesty and down-to-earth qualities remained intact. He was a man of the people and once described himself as “Al, the punter’s pal”.

Much of his generous humanity shone through in his work. He was a champion of the underdog, a campaigner for social justice, was passionate about an independent Scotland and a harsh critic of British imperialism. Many of these themes are expressed in his precise, highly-detailed graphic style, often with accompanying poems and textual fragments, in a series of recent prints he made in collaboration with the Glasgow Print Studio.

Some of the imagery is new and some older, reworked from drawings that extend back, in some cases, to the 1960s. Two of the works he sent to Clanjamfrie — From The Soul’s Proper Loneliness and Inside — are reworked with elements of colour and, like much of Gray’s graphic work, benefit from being seen in the flesh. That’s not a bad metaphor because among many themes, Gray had a fascination for the human body. Despite the harshness of his line, he was adept at conveying sexiness and eroticism.

Gray celebrated his home city of Glasgow, for which he had great pride and affection. His imagery often depicted cityscapes and architecture, including the book jacket for Lanark.

He often incorporated his own poetry into his drawings and prints and one here stands out as being particularly apposite, completed in the year before his death in December. It is entitled To a Critic Who Calls Do not go gentle into that good night a Silly Poem and is unusual in that it is composed of abstracted forms in vivid colours.

The embedded poem is a poignant epitaph to Gray’s memory, and part of it reads: “Please do not let my rhetoric mislead./ The universe ejects no excrement./ We go out of the earth like candle flames/ Leaving behind all we created there:/ Examples of our courage and despair.”

Until April 12, gpsart.co.uk.