Alasdair Gray Season: Spheres of Influence II is an exhibition currently at The Glasgow School of Art’s Reid Gallery until 25 January. The show seeks to provide an alternative reading of Alasdair Gray’s visual work by showcasing both historical and contemporary works. See work from Gray’s personal archive in the exhibition which forms part of the larger Alasdair Gray Season, celebrating the artist’s 80th birthday across Glasgow.

In addition, a series of talks will run around various themes including emasculation, class, the grotesque and fonts. Hear from Rachel Maclean about ‘Brawny Bachelors & Macho Maidens‘ on 19 December and Edwin Pickstone in his talk ‘A potted history of the alphabet and its designs’ on 14 January.

Fore more about the exhibition which runs until 25 January, see the GSA website here.

Images courtesy of GSA with credit to Alan Dimmick

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Alasdair in 64′

I first met Alasdair in about 1997, when he recorded a voice over for a 16mm experimental doc that I had made with, the then, Glasgow Film and Video Workshop. Pre-internet and (for me) pre-mobile, it was a very convoluted path to hook up with him involving connections that my wife had had with the Free University Alasdair had been part of in the ’80’s. When we finally met, we chatted about some other work I had been involved with – documentaries on radical psychiatrist RD Laing, the Kino movement in Glasgow, filmmaker Jenny Gilbertson and a short I had made for Canal Plus in France. Later he visited me and watched some of this work and seemed quite taken with it, writing me a very nice letter assuring me that I had made the right choice of career…something that I wasn’t entirely convinced of at the time as I churned away making grant aided film work and updating weather maps for teletext to bring in an income. It was felt like a wonderful validation from an artist whose work I had an enormous admiration for.

Alasdair in 64′

From these initial encounters, he suggested I might like to make a film about a mural he was planning on restoring in a tenement in Glasgow’s West End. I knew that Alasdair painted but it was an area of his work I only had a vague knowledge of. Alasdair wrote a proposal and I took it to Ken Neil, the then head of arts at Scottish TV (yes, at that time they had an Arts Department producing 26 half hour documentaries a year!). Ken, having seen the experimental film I had made with Alasdair’s voice over, The Fishmonger Scales and Other Red Herrings, liked the idea and even accepted Alasdair’s curve ball of not wanting to appear on the film as a talking head. I resolved this challenge by shooting on a Bolex film camera and intercutting other material of interviews with people who had strong connections to some of Alasdair’s murals dotted around the central belt. The resulting half hour film, Unlikely, Murals Mostly, was a mix of 16mm material shot on a wind up camera and interviews shot on video. It was nominated for a Scottish BAFTA in 2002 and was even, on the invitation of artist Lucy McKenzie, snuck into a gallery in Germany at one point.

Alasdair Palacerigg Opening

I kept up the contact with Alasdair and worked with him again when he began refurbishing another mural, this time in Palacerigg Park in Cumbernauld. As many of Alasdair’s collaborators find, it was becoming apparent that I was embarking on a much longer term project than I had initially thought. Working with Alasdair involved a long period of building up trust – he spoke on several occasions of feeling that he had been stitched up by crews using footage that he hadn’t been aware was being shot. At this stage, in around 2001, I had bought my first DV camera and was nervously experimenting with how it might work. It wasn’t until about 2004, after I had made a film about Alasdair’s Oran Mor mural for BBC Scotland, that I started asking Alasdair to wear a radio mic.

Alasdair – Oran Mor

I’ve always felt that there is something magical about seeing a film that engages with a subject over a number of years. Its something that TV usually doesn’t do – people in power in TV institutions change rapidly and rarely commit to something like this – normally a fully crewed arts doc on TV might shoot over 5 consecutive days. I shot the film around other parts of the work I was doing. For a long time this was participative work in West Dumbartonshire (work that still is an central part of my practice as a filmmaker). so instead of heading home over the Erskine Bridge I would head down Great Western Road and drop in for an hour or so on Alasdair at the top of a scaffold, adding the material to my box of tapes marked “A Gray”. Being a freelancer and more often than not dipping in and out of projects, it was good to feel part of Alasdair’s team. For a while I was even on the payroll of the Oran Mor, building up material for the second TV instalment of the project, this time for BBC Scotland’s Artworks strand.

Chess – Oran Mor

The BBC doc in 2004 allowed me to not only work with a crew, but also to access the archives in a way that I couldn’t have done otherwise, and this subsequently became a central plank of the feature length film. There isn’t a lot of material but like most everything Alasdair does, his work with TV was extraordinary and came with the Gray stamp – even a straightforward interview to camera becomes a meditation on the medium of television and its requirements for the soundbite. In a Hugh Weldon commissioned programme about Alasdair in 1964, Under the Helmet, he dissects the relationship between audiences, artists and the camera in a way that still seems provocative.

Drawing – Hillhead

Over the years the relationship waxed and waned, and I got used to catching up with him and filming when new projects started. The underground mural began in 2009 and typically for Alasdair it involved a whole new process of ceramic tiling that no one had tried on the scale that he, and his collaborator Nichol Wheatley, had tried before. Again filming Alasdair I took the opportunity to experiment with a medium that still seems closer to film than video: DSLR cameras. At the time these new generation of digital stills cameras promised cinema quality images albeit with the proviso that sound had to be recorded separately.

Hillhead Launch

Having gathered all this material the question became how to bring it together. I knew that I didn’t want the film to follow a linear path as that seemed to be at odds with something that had been shot on different formats and contained a strong element of archive. I also knew that I needed to buy some time away from my other commitments to make this happen. I approached a number of production companies but in the end it was Hopscotch Films that put some money in. They had previously produced my BBC programme 0-60 about Alasdair, they also have a strong reputation in supporting filmmakers who want to make more singular pieces of work. They had also the experience of producing The Story of Film, which similarly was conceived on a grand scale and had been undertaken without an initial commission.

In terms of editing observational work, I normally wade in and start chopping to get a feel for the material and build it up, mosaic like. I’ll make long cuts of particular sequences and build up the film with several lines of narrative cutting across the work as a whole. I like to think this, and the absence of a narrator, gives a fresher feel to the overall work, the drawback to this being is that it doesn’t necessarily feel like this on the umpteenth viewing as you try to see if the overall shape “works”. It requires enormous amounts of concentration to bring a fresh eye to the process. It was a strange experience looking through material that I had shot ten years previously, stranger still to see it “upresed” from standard to high definition.

Alasdair looks at Oran Mor

After seeing an initial cut of the film, Allan Hunter at the Glasgow Film Festival invited us to show it as a work in progress in February 2013. It proved to be an equally illuminating and terrifying experience. Sitting at the back of the cinema I got a sense of where it was hitting the mark and where it was falling short. Following on from this I shot more interviews with Alan Bisset and Ian Rankin, recutting it again and screening it at the Dunoon Festival in June the same year.

Alasdair – Maryhill

A year on from this work in progress stage is the films premier at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival. Alasdair has already given me a long list of areas of how the film could be improved and we have discussed tentatively how this might happen. It may yet turn out to be the first instance of a subject’s cut! What I hope is that Alasdair Gray, A Life in Progress, gives an unusually intimate insight into an artist’s life, the way Alasdair works and the way he lives…whilst retaining everyones dignity. But not too much.

Alasdair – Writing

Trailer: Alasdair Gray, A Life in Progress

All images courtesy of Kevin Cameron.

Kevin Cameron’s Alasdair Gray, A Life in Progress will premiere at Sheffield Doc Fest on 12 June in PBS America Showroom 3.

More: Website | Vimeo

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Want to read more blogs by artists? Look here.

Between the 10th and 14th of July, 47 graduates from the Glasgow School of Art will show their work in the NEW FIRM exhibition at Candid Arts Trust in London. To raise funds for this exhibition they are holding an auction of unique artist-designed canvas bags, donated by alumni and tutors from Glasgow School of Art.

The auction includes original, non-reproduced, works by prestigious names such as Alasdair Gray, John Byrne, Peter Capaldi and Toby Paterson, among many others.

For details and images of the artist canvas bags, please go here.
To go straight to the auction and place a bid click here.

This first leg of the auction will close on June 23rd, but there will be another group of bags (including, among others, Turner Prize 2011 winner Martin Boyce) up for bidding the next day.

NEW FIRM
Candid Arts Trust
3-5 Torrens Street, Islington
OPENING: 10/07/12 6pm-10pm
RUNNING: 11/07/12 – 14/07/12 10am-8pm

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For more creative delights we’ve Spotted on the web take a look here.

But what did he do before all this? Read on to find out all about where he started his career…

1 – My first job….well, I think my first job showed me that all jobs are really a collaboration. I was given a paper round for the local freebie thing on the estate where I lived in South Manchester, I was about 13 at the time, but there were about 200 of these things to take round, and I could only carry about 40 in my bag at once. So my poor old stepdad had to also take the night off and sit in his car at various points along the route, waiting to fill up my bag again. How full time posties manage their bag loads I’ve no idea – maybe they also have generous-hearted family members who are prepared to do such things? Anyway, I trundled around, headphones in my ears, walking at a leisurely pace and picking these papers up as I went. Don’t think I realised that this took a couple of hours every Thursday night out of the life of another man, I was very focused on myself at that age. As you are, I suppose. But his sacrifice never really occurred to me until years later. Surely the football must have been on the radio? Maybe he’d have preferred to have been in the pub? Or at home? Anyway. Every project is a joint effort I suppose.

2 – I graduated to collecting money for St Ann’s Hospice, a local hospice also on our estate, who used to run a £2 lottery every week, and folks signed up for this in the grim old days before the shiny National Lottery, which killed many others when it was born in 1994, I think? I remember writing an essay at school about how unjust it was that St Ann’s was going to struggle as I was going to a lot of houses where people had to break the news to me that they were switching…Still. At least I was able to carry all the money myself, and nobody had to wait on me at the bottom of every other road.

3 – I must be missing some things out here, but the next one that stands out to me was working picking Pomelos in Israel on a kibbutz in 1996/7. It turned out Israel wasn’t really for me, and I was uncomfortable with a lot of the things I learned out there about the Israel/Palestine conflict – so I’ve only been back once since, to be best man for my best friend. But the year I lived there did have a big impact on me, and I loved being at the kibbutz. I’m not really an early morning type, but I loved getting up at 6, shovelling down a big breakfast in the canteen and then taking the truck out into the desert to pick these fruit which to me looked like massive pears on the outside, massive oranges on the inside. The fact that I’d never heard of them before made it all seem very other-worldly. We could see the border from where we were working and I always wondered what was on the other side, how people outside the kibbutz viewed those inside, and I could never quite sign up to the idea. But there was a huge sense of camaraderie, I made great friends and loved picking those silly big fruit with the headphones in. (I’m seeing a pattern here. I like jobs where I can switch off and listen to music, daydreaming.) Also, though I’m not a Zionist and I didn’t fall in love with the country, much of the ethos of the kibbutz I picked up at 18 years old did stay with me, and I still enjoy working in communities. It’s just that now those are literary communities.

4 – There were a couple of other brief ones in between but my next main job was cleaning the rooms on the kibbutz, after the Pomelo season ended. Up until then there’d been a women-only policy for cleaning the rooms the (very small amount of) tourists to the kibbutz used, as the guy in charge thought that it was woman’s work – and that men couldn’t do it. This made me and a friend feel like gender warriors…which of course we weren’t, but it did make it easier to motivate ourselves to clean the toilets, mattresses, floors and all that. I don’t think we did a great job and I’ve been a little mop-shy since, but we did get the boss to admit fellas could do the job. Whether he switched his policy again as soon as we were on the plane back to the UK, I’m not sure…

5 – My first proper job in Glasgow, which I got in 1998, was at Curler’s on Byres Road. I started out on the bar and then got trained as a Team Leader, then loved it so much I almost went into the management training programme. As an undergrad I was doing 50/60 hours a week there – in those days it was a student pub, with cheesy discos and clubs on til 3am. Again, I liked being part of the team, counting the money up (with headphones in) and thought I’d like to own a pub of my own one day. But then I looked around and saw all the managers had no life, they were always always in the pub, and even when they finished they’d stay for a pint or two. I got lucky, as at Curler’s I met Alasdair Gray, who I later wrote a book about. So my 5th job was an important part of my first real career. Which became writing…

Find out more about Rodge on his website and follow him on Twitter.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.