well. Egyptian, Greek, Renaissance artists and William Blake had painted vigorous people without much distortion and with no loss of imaginative force. I wanted to gain that glorious ability.
St Christopher , 1951, ink and watercolour on paper, 42 x 30 cm
God obsessed me because, while respecting my dad’s Agnosticism, I wanted the universe – everything – to have one great soul or mind or force that had allowed Jesus, Buddha and many others to show how we could make the world more heavenly, and would at last help us to succeed. The God of Jonah was that sort, by the miracle of the big fish saving the prophet to warn a city of its evil ways, and by the miracle of the gourd teaching him that evil springs from ignorance, and should be forgiven. I probably showed a clean-shaven God with a bald scalp and a lion’s mane of hair behind his ears because nobody else had done so. I should have given Him a better face.
If Jonah’s God was angelically merciful, the God of Exodus was a communal devil ordering refugees from Egypt to invade Palestine and exterminate the natives. Yet Assyrian inscriptions, history books and newspapers show such devils were commanding other nations then, and ever since. I had many arguments with a Christian school friend who found nothing wrong with the Exodus Jehovah and thought people’s evil actions were due to a false yet powerful god, the Devil. I believed the universe could only have one guiding soul with many aspects, and Christians who divided it into a good God and bad Satan, who would both at last have most people tortured for ever in Hell, were setting up the schizophrenic deity shown here.
And the Lord God Prepared a Gourd , 1951, ink and gouache on paper, 20 x 21 cm
Heaven and Hell (We the Saved – Thou the Damned) , 1951, ink and gouache on paper, 27 x 27 cm
In 1950 or ’51 my teachers and parents accepted I would never pass a Latin or Maths exam and enter university, and would probably become a local civil servant because nobody leaving secondary school in Scotland could start earning a living as an artist. This left me over a year to study and paint what I wished. In a history essay on the Industrial Revolution I mentioned Parliamentary Acts that turned common land into private property, driving families out of cottage industries into quickly built factory towns where steam-powered machines allowed cruel exploitation, which happened because wealthy folk strove to get richer fast, and ignored the misery they gave others.
My History teacher said my essay was “too personal” – it passed a moral judgement historians should avoid. We amicably disagreed about this and he suggested I put my views into a lecture for the Whitehill Literary and Debating Society, of which I was a very vocal member. These pictures were made to illustrate that lecture, being shown on a screen by an unwieldy projector called an epidiascope. Starting with The Ice Age and Stone Age man, the story of mankind followed with Keystone Cops rapidity. The worst of city life appeared as Human Sacrifice, the best as Babylonian Priests recording an eclipse, having devised an alphabet and calendar that made writing history possible. Moses on Sinai, leader of wandering Arab tribes who believed in One God, carved out a strong moral law for them on a stone tablet. Greek Democracies achieved greater freedom of new thought, poetry, drama, art and philosophy, which Roman Imperialism partly destroyed and partly (by adoption) prolonged.
A Personal View of History: The Ice Age; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/21 x 15 cm
A Personal View of History: The Stone Age; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/21 x 15 cm
A Personal View of History: Human Sacrifice; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/21 x 15 cm
A Personal View of History: Babylonian Science; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/21 x 15 cm
A Personal View of History: Moses on Sinai: The Moral Law; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/21 x 15 cm
A Personal View of History: Greek Civilization , 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/21 x 15 cm
Between Roman Imperialism (to the left) and the Dark Ages (beneath) came The Sermon on the Mount, with Jesus telling the people of that vast, slave-based empire that every human soul was equally valued by God. He was a moonlit figure on a low pinnacle, preaching to upturned faces and seen from behind. (I have never been able to imagine Jesus from in front.) But I lost that picture. Then came Monastic Learning, The Feudal System, James Watt’s Steam Engine and The Industrial City. The final picture was to be The Triumph of Socialism, showing Riddrie’s Municipal Public Library. I thought this well-planned, well-stocked public library was a triumphant example of local egalitarian democracy. Here, even more than in Whitehill Senior Secondary School, I had been able to give myself exactly the education I wanted, so thought anybody who could read and think would be able to get it there too. Every district of Glasgow and Britain now had such free libraries. A just civilization was finally being established.
A Personal View of History: Roman Imperialism; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/ 21 x 15 cm
A Personal View of History: The Dark Ages; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/ 21 x 15 cm
A Personal View of History: The Monk; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/ 21 x 15 cm
A Personal View of History: The Feudal System; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/ 21 x 15 cm
A Personal View of History: The Engineer; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/ 21 x 15 cm
A Personal View of History: The Industrial City , 1950, ink and gouache on paper,
