At the end of my year at Glenrothes, I wrote to East Kilbride & Stonehouse Development Corporation and was offered the position of ‘town artist’ (a title exclusive to artists working for New Town Development Corporations in the UK at that time)…
By 1974 East Kilbride, Scotland’s first post-war New Town was well established and the Development Corporation had just been given the task of building another New Town at Stonehouse in South Lanarkshire. So my job was to be a member of the team who were planning the new New Town at Stonehouse while at the same time proposing and making artworks for the older New Town of East Kilbride…
It seemed important to me that where possible other members of staff
were involved in the production of the town’s artworks. This mural ‘Etruscan Colonnade’ – on 32 garage doors was painted by the Corporation’s house painters.
I did the drawings for this 3.5m x 2.5m sand-blasted slate mural in Greenhills Shopping Centre in East Kilbride. In those days there were not the computer facilities we have today, and I traced the figures in pencil lines at different sizes then transferred them to the slate panels. These were then sand-blasted by a specialist company in Glasgow. I think I was reflecting a spirit of optimism that was around in the Development Corporation at that time.
Our son Vincent had just come into the world, and Rosi and I had moved to Cotcastle Farmhouse on the edge of Stonehouse, where I was provided with a studio/workshop by the Development Corporation.
I worked closely with the architects of the Development Corporation and accompanied them on visits to a number of notable buildings and developments around the country. We wanted to see how they inhabited the space around them because we imagined that the new town of Stonehouse would somehow grow out of the ancient villages in the area, emulating the way that they had developed over the centuries. As part of our research, we had come to see the new glass houses of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, where I took this photograph…
I’m not sure what the conversation was about – John (pretending to pick his nose) may have been offering an opinion about the structure, while Innes (kneeling) may have had a differing view. But this is not what I wanted to say about our trip to Edinburgh in 1975.
We were walking on that street known as George IV Bridge, just at the place where one might look over and see the GrassMarket area in the shadow of the Castle. Innes did happen to look over the bridge as we passed, and saw a drunk and homeless man lying on the pavement far below. He asked us to wait for him on the bridge while he made a significant detour, eventually appearing beside the drunk man. I saw Innes speaking to the man to ask if he was OK, and as far as it was possible, helped him up. He probably gave him a couple of quid too, to help him on his way.
Innes Taggart, architect, died in the early 1980’s. Many people were at his funeral and some wept openly, for Innes was a great man.
I was working as the town artist in East Kilbride & Stonehouse, and had responsibilities of the kind outlined above…
But apart from the concrete animals, I also wanted and needed to be making more personal statements which reflected my interest in time as the reiteration of space. I remember going into the chief architect and town planner’s office with a beautifully crafted model of the artwork in the video and explaining that this was the soulful ringing of the Earth that circled and resonated in the planet. It was breaking through the surface of the Earth in East Kilbride for a few moments, in the form of white concrete discs. Well, all they could think of were reasons why I shouldn’t do this (kids falling off the 2m highest one and hurting themselves etc). It was in that moment that I began to lose interest in being there.
The main thing that drove me artistically in those days was my feeling for space…
I mean the sheer beauty of the space between the things around me; not the shape of the things themselves, but the almost palpable spatiality which those things outline and embrace – and which can be best sensed in movement. You know what I’m talking about… when you cycle past some large trees on a beautiful summer’s day… looking up into boughs and the branches as you drift past…
thinking…
what is actually going on when you sense the space of the things around you?… and how and why is it beautiful?
slow cycling… look up into the tree… huge boughs glide slowly past each other… and branches dance around each other… while the canopy of shimmering leaves envelops and loosely defines the space below…
but to identify what we’re seeing and why we feel it to be beautiful… (if indeed we do)… we need to differentiate one moment from the next… remembering that quantum entanglement means that what one sees is actually what one is… the present moment …the moment of be-coming real as one thing is beauty.
but surely beauty is simply in the eye of the beholder… just a word to describe an opinion. indeed! but that actually makes no difference. beauty is the awareness of the be-coming of the thing in an otherwise unnoticed continuum of be-coming.
moment one.. stanley is (tree-bough-branch-leaf) universal thing 1
moment two.. stanley is (tree-bough-branch-leaf) universal thing 2
…where each universal thing is a complex texture of tri-versal under-standings each with-as the others. The moment of under-standing, the moment of beauty is always the present moment… as myself-void-otherness be-comes universe within universe… which it grasps as spacetime.
I intend to go into this in greater detail later.
The bottom line was then as it is now, that I need to make art…
and although I now see the multiple animal casts as part of my artistic development, in the 1970’s I did not want to be making concrete elephants. I wanted to inhabit and reveal the space among things, and if I couldn’t make my own art as the ‘town artist’ for East Kilbride and Stonehouse, then I would make it for myself and for people who lived near these places, to stumble upon…
…and of course the kids were growing up. Here’s a photograph of Mark standing beside a work near Stonehouse called ‘Messerschmidt cut’…
…in a rough patch of land I cut a trench as precisely as possible. All that I took out of that trench was used to make a small mound, with a cleft, from which the trench seemed to emanate and flow. I lined the trench with orange granite chippings of the kind that were commonplace on the roads of Lanarkshire. In the final section of the trench I placed a small boulder above which was suspended a model Messerschmidt jet aircraft. The idea was to establish a moment of spatial beauty and trace its source. This hand tinted B&W photo gives an impression of the colours…
And close by I made another work about the beautiful space between things…
By 1976 I had to admit that I was not cut out for working in East Kilbride & Stonehouse Development Corporation, then things began to fall apart – quite literally…
Cotcastle farmhouse had been built above ancient mine workings. One day we noticed that a crack had appeared in one of the walls, and engineers came and stuck little pieces of glass called ‘tell-tales’ across the crack. In a couple of weeks the glass had broken, which meant that the crack was getting wider and the house was falling down!
Then something else began to fall apart. The Government of the day decided to change its policy towards the building of new towns and the Stonehouse New Town project was cancelled! People were seriously pissed off and felt lost, so I did this pencil drawing of what I saw. (Compare it to the optimistic confidence of the ‘Ghost Fliers’ mural above). The chief town planner looked at it one day and told me that he recognized himself…
But I don’t know if Donald noticed that the picture he was looking at (800mm x 600mm) was a photograph. I had made this pencil drawing about how my fellows and I felt, and yet I was so scared that it would just disappear into some corporate vacuum that I dared not show them the original! So I had this sophisticated print made of it and kept the drawing for myself. I had become so screwed up by years of having to amend my creativity to the whims of corporate interest that I lost my direction as an artist, so when notice came through that anyone who had been working on the Stonehouse New Town project would of course be employed by East Kilbride District Council… I left.
All love to Rosi (Mark and Vincent too) for supporting me then – as they always have done.)