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'The Falls of Clyde' by Alasdair Gray
Photographer - Ruth Clark
Alasdair Gray's The Falls of Clyde, 1969
Restored in April 2009
History of the Mural
This mural is the full length of a wall in the Riverside Restaurant, 25 feet long by 4 feet high. It was originally painted in 1969 to decorate a room in the Tavern, Kirkfieldbank, that was being turned into a lounge bar behind the public saloon bar. The owner was James Campbell, a local builder employing Robin Mason to mastermind the renovation. Campbell wanted a mural in the lounge so Mason recommended for the commission Alasdair Gray, with whom he had been a fellow pupil at Whitehill Senior Secondary School, Glasgow. In 1957 Gray, still a student at Glasgow School of Art, had completed his Horrors of War mural in the Scottish-USSR Friendship Society near Kelvinbridge; in 1959 he had painted the ceiling of Belleisle Street Synagogue, Langside, with a cloudy firmament; in 1963 completed his Six Days of Creation on the chancel ceiling of Greenhead Church of Scotland, Bridgeton, with a large wall panel of The Seventh Day.
Gray was given the Kirkfieldbank commission on the understanding that he would not be paid if the owner disliked it, in which case the mural could be painted over. Gray travelled by train to Lanark, ten minutes walk from Kirkfieldbank, usually sleeping overnight in the room being renovated. A few people recall Alasdair retiring to his sleeping bag on a platform above what would be the lounge bar's gantry. The mural was completed in a month or two, to James Campbell's satisfaction.
Subject Matter
This painting is Gray's only mural of a large natural landscape. It shows the Clyde as it flows from its source in the south east behind Tinto, the highest hill in Lanarkshire, to its departure in the north west down the valley behind the hill where the town of Lanark stands. The main features are the great waterfalls of Bonnington Linn and Corra Linn, mighty waterfalls connected by nearly two miles of a very deep gorge. Gray chose this subject because it is a short distance upstream from Kirkfieldbank, and is a site of natural beauty that inspired many writers and landscape painters, including Wordsworth and Turner. It is also important to Scotland's political and social history. William Wallace started his guerrilla war for Scottish independence in Lanark, and used a cave in the gorge as a hiding place. David Dale and Robert Owen, humane factory owner and founder of Cooperative Socialism, built the model industrial village of New Lanark there, so that the force of the Falls drove their cotton mill machinery. In the 1920s Scottish Electricity built a weir above Bonnington Linn which diverted most of the river to a power station above New Lanark.
To distort the scene as little as possible, Gray manipulated the perspective to show all the features mentioned above (apart from Wallace's cave) in their natural order. He has also depicted the Falls as they appear twice a year nowadays when the power station raises the weir dam, letting the river enter and leave the gorge with the full natural force that inspired awe in 18th and 19th-century tourists.
2009 Restoration
The current owner of the building, Andy Boyle, rediscovered the mural in 2008 after stripping off layers of paper put over it by several owners. He liked it, though the colours were much faded and the surface pierced by fixings for wall lights. The biggest area of damage was the extreme left, where water penetration had led to 30 inches by four feet being wholly replastered. Brian McLaughlin, picture restorer, repaired the uneven surfaces and suggested Alasdair Gray himself should restore the full mural.
Photographer - Ruth Clark
Gray started work in February 2009, assisted by Richard Todd. No complete photographs of the original mural exist, and hardly any of his sketches for it so he relied chiefly on memory and recent photographs of the landscape when working on the demolished parts, chiefly in the sky and left hand side. He suspects that in these areas, his forty years of additional painting experience may have enabled him to improve upon what was originally there.
Photographer - Ruth Clark
Alasdair Gray
Gray was born in Glasgow in 1934 and studied Design and Mural Painting at Glasgow School of Art from 1952-57. He has since had many exhibitions, especially in Glasgow, painted eight public or domestic murals there, also one in Palacerigg Nature Reserve and Abbots House Local History Museum, Dunfermline. He has also written and designed 18 published books, most of them fiction, and won the Whitbread and Guardian book prizes. His most celebrated novel, Lanark, was published in 1981 and his most recent novel, Old Men in Love, was published in 2007. A Life in Pictures, a visual biography of Gray's life and artwork, will be published by Canongate in 2010. He believes he has painted and written more than most people will ever have time to bother with.
The Alasdair Gray Foundation
Over the last 50 years Alasdair Gray has built a diverse literary and visual archive of .approx 1,000 items. In 2009 a Foundation will be established to conserve and promote access to the work of Alasdair Gray, and to secure its continuing study and appreciation both now and the future.
For further information on the Alasdair Gray Foundation please contact:
5 St. Margaret's Place,
Glasgow
G1 5JY
Tel - 0141 553 2662
Page Last Updated - 06/09/2009 |  |
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