Artist Uncovered: Alan McGowan

"All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature." Charles Baudelaire

We meet in Edinburgh’s City Art Centre cafe across the road from Waverley station, a couple of hours before Alan McGowan catches a train due south for a week-long teaching residency. 
This artist who will be leading two painting workshops for Art in Healthcare at the Edinburgh Art Fair next month, has no work in the collection yet but this is about to change. 

McGowan has a busy peripatetic practice that takes him all over the UK and Ireland teaching drawing, anatomy and painting. A freelance career was not always the norm for this educator who was once based in the University of Northumbria until the gradual exclusion of drawing from art schools, an upshot of last century’s Modernist thrust, prompted him to take the life-changing decision of jumping ship. 

Seated 1 

mixed media, 57x40 cms

image courtesy of the artist

That is how passionately McGowan feels about drawing and more particularly life-drawing. He refutes eloquently the argument dealt against his discipline of choice that it is only a skill that requires no intellectual discourse:

“The way one draws is connected to how one thinks and interacts with the world. We reveal our vision of the world through our own process of drawing.” 

Anybody who has attended a life-drawing class will know that everybody draws the same model differently. We each alter and distort what is in front of us in our own distinctive way into a representation of reality rather than a faithful reproduction. 

Dissolve 2

mixed media, 67x84cms

image courtesy of the artist

His commitment to life-drawing did not signal in McGowan a return to classicist principles. On the contrary he wanted to be regarded as a contemporary artist, a radical move at the time when conceptual art and installations were the avant-garde. 
And so he went back to basics, re-learning to draw and see without the pseudo narrative that his training in illustration had taught him. All the time he was experimenting with techniques and materials, questioning his purpose and reading from thinkers as diverse as Montaigne, Proust and Camus to name a few. 

Untitled Figure

mixed media, 56x66cms

image courtesy of the artist

McGowan describes his relationship with portraiture as “strange”. He explains that it is more about connecting with humanity than about the individual. His models’ facial features are often only hinted at or hidden, his brush strokes probing deep below the naked skin for the elusive essential being and shared consciousness within.
Then he realised that all the drawings he had accumulated over the years amounted to a coherent body of work that backed up his argument that “there is an intellectual basis in drawing” and as such they needed to be shown.
An exhibition followed together with the publication in 2012 of a catalogue entitled The Language of the Body: Figure Drawings in Four Chapters with each of the 64 coloured plates displaying his expressionist style and fauvist palette. The book is divided into four categories ‘Between’, ‘Dissolve’, ‘Language’ and ‘See’. The only text is in the quotations that accompany each heading. This self-imposed restraint allows the readers to make their own connections.

Lay

mixed media, 57x84cms

image courtesy of the artist

Alan McGowan’s relationship with portraiture is not only his and the model’s but also ours, the viewers, as we bring our own thoughts and circumstances into the reading of the work. When hung in a healthcare setting, it is guaranteed to stop people in their track. It will take on new meanings and provoke a variety of interpretations and emotions in patients, medical staff and visitors. This is the measure of the artist’s success in his endeavour. 

Martine Foltier Pugh is a freelance writer and visual artist based in Edinburgh.

With thanks to Alan McGowan.

Alan McGowan is one of six artists involved with Art in Healthcare at the Edinburgh Art Fair in Edinburgh Corn Exchange (15-17 November). He will be giving two demonstrations on 'Painting from preparatory sketches' on Friday 15. For more details and the full programme go to  http://www.artinhealthcare.org.uk/userfiles/file/PDF%20Artist%20bios%20and%20talk%20info.pdf


Alan McGowan The Language of the Body- Figure Drawings in Four Chapters
published in 2012 by SATURATION, Edinburgh ISBN 978-0-9572428-0-7

Artist Uncovered: Ian Hamilton Finlay

Martine F Pugh searches for the man behind the genius

Ian Hamilton Finlay was a philosopher, a poet, an ‘avant-gardener’, a sculptor and a revolutionary in thoughts and temperament. How should I uncover arguably the greatest Scottish artist of the twentieth century?  Then I came across an insightful essay by his son Alec where I learnt that Finlay suffered from agoraphobia all his adult life. His affliction revealed to me the man behind the genius and somehow it all began to make sense.

A, E, I, O, Blue, 1992 with Julie Farthing

silkscreen, 45.8 x 152.0 cm

Finlay dismissed his ‘nervous anxiety’ as “unpleasant, but no more interesting, really, than toothache” but his son’s tribute shows what profound effect his fear of busy urban streets had on his life and work and how it inspired him to create  gardens and organise work settings where he could feel safe in natural but controlled rural environments. 

Little Sparta, Finlay’s best known garden and artwork, is situated in the Pentland Hills, south of Edinburgh. Originally called Stonypath, it was an untamed moorland with only one tree in 1966 when Finlay and his wife Sue moved in. With Sue’s planting and Finlay’s planning, it evolved slowly, money was scarce,  into the series of verdant gardens we can visit today that are filled with neo-classical references to Ancient Greece, Finlay’s spiritual and cultural home, and to the French Revolution whose theorists he greatly admired. 

Citron Bleu, 1994, with Gary Hincks 

silkscreen, 45.3 x 57.7 cm

Art historian Bill Hare defines Little Sparta as “a masterly twentieth-century reworking of the Enlightenment Landscape Garden where Apollonian power of reason seeks to control and order through art the ever-threatening chaos of unruly nature.” 

What is true of the great eighteenth-century landscape tradition is also true of Finlay’s endeavour to control his own emotions by immersing himself in art and in the physicality of gardening.

Column Drum to Drum, 1991, with Gary Hincks 

silkscreen, 23.8 x 57.0 cm

But Apollo carried a bow as well as a lyre and when his Arcadian haven came under bureaucratic attacks in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Finlay channelled his frustration and anger into artistic ‘wars’ through sculptures, poems and prints. Stonypath then was renamed ‘Little Sparta’, an allusion to the Spartan wars of Antiquity against Athens and to Edinburgh’s nickname of ‘Athens of the North’.

His movements may have been restricted but Finlay was nonetheless well informed as he corresponded with writers and poets in Britain and around the world. He also surrounded himself with friends and collaborators who were curators, publishers, printmakers, poets, sculptors and stone carvers. With his garden, they provided him with the supportive environment his creativity needed. His genius was to know how to use their particular vision to fulfil and expand his own.

Seams, 1969 

silkscreen, 43.5 x 56.3 cm

Finlay's pioneering written work took many forms that defied syntax and convention: concrete poetry or poem objects  that you can touch, one line poems, poem drawings, sound poems, embroidered texts, texts shaped in neon, small press publications such as POTH (Poor . Old . Tired . Horse) to name a few.

Art in Healthcare is fortunate to have six prints that span four decades. Together they showcase his characteristic wit and visual power and speak for themselves. Two of them may need further explaining. With ‘Citron Blue’ Finlay alluded to the shape of Orkney boats which reminded him of lemons with their protrusions fore and aft and to a poem by Goethe whom Finlay greatly admired. As for ‘Column Drum to Drum’ it refers to the building process of classical columns that involved stacking up drum-shaped sections. 

Sackcloth, 1992, with Pip Hall

silkscreen, 42.0 x 42.3 cm

Ian Hamilton Finlay’s lifelong struggle against agoraphobia had an extraordinary conclusion. He suffered a stroke near the end of his life which reversed his phobia and allowed him to do some travelling once more. 

Since Finlay’s death in 2006, Little Sparta has been looked after by his trust. The future seemed uncertain because of the high maintenance costs but it was announced in June this year that a deal has been signed with Edinburgh University (which now includes Edinburgh College of Art) that will allow scholars to use the house as a study centre. A new beginning unfolds.

Martine Foltier Pugh is a freelance writer and visual artist based in Edinburgh

With thanks to

Bill Hare, art historian and Chair of Art in Healthcare Board of Trustees

The Wild Hawthorn Press for their information on the prints in the AiH collection. http://www.ianhamiltonfinlay.com/wild_hawthorn_press.html

‘Ian Hamilton Finlay – Selections’ edited and with an Introduction by Alec Finlay, University of California Press, 2012.

Little Sparta trust: http://www.littlesparta.org.uk/

The exhibition ‘Ian Hamilton Finlay. Poet. Artist. Revolutionary’ is currently running at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow until March 1 2014.