Two Alasdairs Retrospective

Apart from their name and the fact that they attended Glasgow School of Art, Alasdair Gray and Alasdair Taylor do not appear at first glance to have a lot in common judging by their joint exhibition.

Alasdair Gray's refined style is illustrated in an ink portrait of Gray and Taylor from 1995. His delicate rendering of himself and his friend acts as an introduction to the exhibition as well as a representation of their lifelong friendship. Following this is a display of Gray's work which focuses on Glasgow and its people, perhaps best exemplified in his large-scale painting, Cowcaddens in the Fifties. The tenements, the old boy leaning on the lamppost, the children playing in the street, the courting couple walking into the sunset; this romanticised imagery of Glasgow seems to be a motif in Gray's work but the images are stirring to those who, like me, have a great fondness for Glasgow. In his street scenes Gray seems to create the cityscape first and then adds the people, who appear ghost-like, translucent against the buildings. This is perhaps a comment on the the city as a constant with its changing people altering the face of it.

Moving away from the delicate, romantic imagery of Glasgow, we come to the late Alasdair Taylor's work which is much more expressionistic in its execution using abstract imagery and bold brush strokes in thick oil paints. His collages using newspaper-type text and pictures to give us hints of Paris (“arrogance”) and Danish Girl (“worth fighting for”). Taylor's large scale painting Ghosts does seem to echo Gray's ghostly street scenes with the cultural Zeitgeist from the newspaper shining through the oil paint. The last three of Taylor's works notably abandon the expressionistic style in favour of a much more traditional rendering of the idyllic Scottish landscape.

The exhibition presents the vastly different styles of the two artists while somehow managing to allow the viewer to draw parallels between the two by their use of similar motifs in their works.