All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go Painting

Being brought up in Glasgow had, as I grew older, quite a powerful effect on my art.It is a Victorian city of beautiful stone buildings, many built with warm sandstone, some in grey granite and in many styles from Classical and Neo-Gothic to Art Deco.Most of the population lived in tenements, usually four stories high, with wide streets teeming with people, main activity being children playing football.I loved to draw and paint these buildings and people and was fascinated by the sandstone of the tenements, some built in warm grey stone , others in dark red terracotta.After teaching in two Glasgow secondary schools I moved in 1978 to the Outer Hebrides for a teaching post where I encountered an incredible stone landscape of almost translucent highly textured grey granite.This reminded me of my excursions in the West of Ireland which had the same kind of landscape with formations of ruined granite cottages scattered everywhere which people had long abandoned by fair means or foul for foreign shores.The similarity of the landscape of South Uist in the southern Hebrides was very poignant as three of my grandparents came from Ireland.Later in my personal and teaching career these landscapes and love of stone from my Glasgow upbringing were to have a profound effect.For example the tenement sandstone at street level were often covered with chalk drawings, lettering and names, a common theme being brides and grooms in white chalk made by young girls.This gave me the initial idea of painting images on stone formations.Coming from a Catholic background with strong clerical links, my father and grandfather were for a time Franciscan Brothers, and having three uncles who were priests, I had a strong leaning towards theology.One of my early interests were the catacombs in Rome going back to the third century AD with their wonderful graffiti Christian symbols which led on to the study of Classical and Christian emblem books.From these sources I could form images that would be painted onto the stone formations that I had painted in oil, beeswax and emulsion tempera.Another source of inspiration is the Medieval Madonna and Child in which I have shown Christ in his mother’s womb in a realistic manner which the stone structure makes possible and in a way is a form of cubism which allows an image like the unborn child to be shown on the surface of the stone structure without it looking unnatural.