ALASDAIR TAYLOR
RETROSPECTIVE
On Saturday, July 22, 2023, the Alasdair Taylor Retrospective opened its doors, presenting a remarkable collection of over 100 art pieces, ranging from paintings to sculptures, as well as the artist's sketchbooks. The exhibition thoughtfully arranged the artworks in chronological order, taking visitors on a journey through Alasdair Taylor's artistic evolution, from his early days in art school in the 1950s to his passing in 2007.
The event also featured insights from Malcolm Dickson, representing Street Level, and Sorcha Dallas, the curator of the Alasdair Gray Archive, shedding light on the lives and artistic contributions of both Alasdair and Annelise.
A poignant and heartfelt tribute to the couple, written by James Kelman, a close friend of Alasdair and Annelise, offered a moving personal reflection on their profound friendship. Read the full tribute here:
In the mid 1980s I was a self-employed Man-with-a-Van. This is where I got to know Alasdair Taylor properly. I spent very many hours down at Northbank Cottage, shifting some of his work from Portencross to the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. It was for the 5 Artists exhibition which was produced, organised, bought and paid for by his great friend and comrade, Alasdair Gray, or Meister Gray, as Alasdair Taylor referred to him.
Northbank was located between Hunterston Terminal and Portencross; walking from the harbour there, take the track by the beach, turn a bend and there beneath a cliff is where it was located. It was a great place. It was in a wee bay all by itself. A solitary cottage between two bends. I envied him. He knew that beach inside out, seeing directly across to wee Cumbrae. Sometimes in the evening he sailed with one of his local pals, across to big Cumbrae for a last pint. What a life! It sounded like heaven. He had a big dog, very patient. It didn't have a name that I remember, he just called it the mutt.
I have a great photograph of Alasdair and Annelise from 1991. It was at a book launch of my own, held at the old Musicians Club on Berkeley Street, Charing Cross which was appropriate. Alasdair was knowledgeable in many areas, and music was one of them. In the early days He played drums in a jazz band. Also he played football to a good level (for Lesmahagow juniors, if I remember).
Alasdair and Annelise moved to Northbank Cotrage in 1965. For at least half of the time there was no electricity. Was there gas? running water? I don't know. Did it matter? I'm sure it did. I do remember that when electricity was mooted Alasdair was wary but I don't think Annelise and the girls were in the slightest bit wary. In the photograph I mentioned Annelise is so relaxed and cheery looking, just enjoying the craic, having a laugh with their friends and peers, other artists, actors, musicians; at home in the company. It was such a tragedy when she died, a major tragedy, it was horrible. I remember from the time my own feeling of how utterly Northbank Cottage seemed to exist by virtue of Annelise. She was a force. She was the one. I don't think I was alone thinking how on earth will Alasdair survive! But he had to, and he did. More power to his memory, and to the family.
But also there is the matter of his art - of art and self survival. Alasdair Taylor painted and worked as the whole person, he worked at full pitch, that was how he worked; this is a mark of greatness that I see, each day an advance on the one before, that entire 24 hour period, all of the experiences and phenomena that this entails, it is there in what it takes to continue the work, all of the emotional peaks and troughs, and for Alasdair this too was an aid to survival, if not a life-saver, and he continued working, making what he could of it.
In 2005 he suffered a major stroke. Again was that courage, the tenacity, fighting to survive. Here he suffered a degree of paralysis, including the loss of the use of his right hand. When it came to his work there was nobody more practical, and ruthlessness was a part of that, a necessary part, and the ruthlessness began in and for himself. Alasdair started training himself in the use of his left hand and I seem to remember him showing me a drawing or something while he was in that wee hospital.
At the same time he had to leave Northbank Cottage. There was no choice.
A major problem arose immediately. His cottage with its dilapidated outbuildings were crammed full of paintings, sculpture, painted stone - his 'found' and sculpted materials. It was a magnificent collection, the product of a lifetime’s commitment. For that limited period, during Taylor's hospitalization Northbank Cottage was as it was when he lived and worked there. The art was there for the taking. What would happen to it?
An immediate inventory was necessary. This was taken on by Malcolm Dickson. What a job he did, such a great job, assisted by Euan Sutherland (both here today).
I thought I knew Alasdair's work but on that day, the day of the inventory - man, it was breathtaking. I found it overwhelming. Everywhere ye looked there was work in progress, pieces of everything, driftwood, stones, old picture frames and reusable canvasses. Then on top of that or side by side with that, underneath and over above, were the artefacts and ephemera, the tools and equippage; the notebooks, papers and old correspondence. Alasdair was a great letter writer, his actual writing itself and I looked foward to his letters. They're now in my own archive in the National Library. Then also his books: all manner of stuff, everything. Even tramping through the long grass, ye didnay know what ye would find, everywhere you looked, collected, created, recreated by this working artist over a period of fifty years.
To see an artist’s own work, placed in his or her own workspace is a rare experience. In some permanent spaces the curator tries to recreate this, exhibiting personal and found objects, not to enhance the finished work, but to offer another dimension. I was lucky enough to see it there, alongside Malcolm, Euan and Meister Gray.
I wrote about an earlier time of my own, in a previous essayexperience, and sitting in the stone alcove at a single window, either in the kitchen or living room, overlooking the north coast of Arran, the Sound of Bute and Little Cumbrae; the two islands and the waters between the two, and through towards Ettrick Bay and farther west to Kintyre and Crinan, or heading south by Lochranza. I was staring out, aware of the moment by moment shift in light, sound and movement, of sea and sky, of land, vegetation, even the air itself, the sense that there is only movement, it cannot be trapped, nothing else but movement, no one element may be isolated. The label ‘abstract expressionism’ becomes not meaningless as a route to misunderstanding. It subverts the insight required to appreciate what it is the artist is doing; both the enormity of the task, and the extent of the achievement. This is the level Alasdair Taylor reaches in his art. It carries the label ‘abstract expressionism’ but in its own context it becomes the most intense realism. In some of those wild paintings it is as though the artist has expressed the very elements. What are 'the very elements'? I don't know but what they amount to is movement. Alasdair Taylor's art expresses movement - not as per Newtonian clockwork but in all its wild, turbulence. Very Scottish, and I mean by that, not some sort of ridiculous nationalist point, but itself a core element, of the Scottish intellectual tradition, expressed in the work of its philosophers, scientists, and others.
Back in 2005 some of us hoped that money might have been found to house a permanent site, through the combined effort of local and national authorities. That vast and magnificent collection could have found a home, in the permanent storeage of a national gallery. From this base, exhibitions would have taken place periodically. Something like that seemed practical.
Artists make judgments constantly, intuitive and otherwise. Bureaucrats avoid judgments, and avoid the intuitive form at all costs. They prefer a decision-making procedure, where an end statement is obtained from a series of statements, arrived at by logical inference. In this way no one can be accused of making a personal decision. Heaven forbid! Arts bureaucrats rely on the judgement of art experts, most preferably, the ones whose expertise has been validated by an external authority. Let us ship Alasdair Taylor’s collection to London or New York City, to Venice or to Paris, and seek the opinion of a foreign critic: Please sir, is this the work of a real artist or just a Scottish one?
It takes a huge act of faith to struggle and fight through the years, as Jean and Anna have done, given the moments of doubt that there must have been; as always there are for the family of an artist whose work is barely acknowleged beyond a small circle of people. Alasdair was their dad, of course he was, but it was his work that was special, that needs to be encountered, needs to be seen. They stuck with it, trusting their own judgment, keeping faith in the own judgment and understanding of what art is, and what great art can be.
The people here at the Mclaurin Gallery have stepped in with their support. It is wonderful to see this happening.
In 1973, when Alasdair Taylor was living a hermit-like life with his wife Annelise and daughters, Anna and Jean, in a cottage next to Hunterston Nuclear Power Station in Ayrshire, he was profiled in an influential Scottish arts magazine.
The piece in Scottish International was written by the artist and writer Alasdair Gray. The two men had first met in the 1950s at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) when they were students. Gray was studying Mural Painting and Taylor, Painting and Drawing. Gray was two years ahead of Taylor. They became lifelong friends, with Gray acting as a loyal cheerleader for the younger man over the five decades which followed.
In the Scottish International article, Gray described Taylor as "a lyrical painter: a painter whose colour, like a musician's sound, makes sombre and radiant feelings without showing (as many painters do and all writers must) details of the social life causing them."
Gray observed that Taylor often worked like Rembrandt, lying a canvas flat on the floor of the dilapidated outhouse which he used as a studio, "building up the paint in jewel-like flakes."
Taylor could also, according to Gray, "show whole characters and forms with a few quick, nervous pen strokes on paper […] full of outraged energy, outrage so strong that sometimes it incorporated swear words. Why?"
Gray, like many admirers of Alasdair Taylor's work, was drawn to the bristly creative energy which possessed this handsome bearded Highlander.
Gray even knitted Taylor into his fiction. His short story, Portrait of a painter, "the story of an artist ... who persists in his painting though he remains unrecognised and unrewarded" was included in Lean Tales (1985), co-written with James Kelman and Agnes Owens.
In 2005, Booker Prize winning author, Kelman, who first met Taylor when he ran an art handling business in the 1980s, wrote in The Sunday Herald newspaper, that to be around Taylor's work was to be "in the presence of great art."
He was describing a trip to Portencross to catalogue Taylor's work before it was packed up and moved to storage. Further into the article, Kelman observed: "In some of those wild paintings it is as though the artist has trapped the elements themselves."
It was a melancholy visit. Having suffered a stroke in 2005, Taylor, then 68, was unable to live on his own. Annelise had died aged 54, more than a decade previously not long after being diagnosed with cancer. Taylor's daughters had no choice but to move their father to more appropriate accommodation.
Despite Kelman calling for a major retrospective of his work in 2005, apart from a small survey of his work at Irvine's Harbour Arts Centre in 2007, the year he died, it has taken 16 years for such a show to take place.
As this snapshot of his vast artistic output prepares to open in Ayr, the question is, what compelled this man – who shied away from fame and fortune with almost pathological zeal – to create constantly?
Taylor's desire to create saw him working on every surface, from newspaper, to canvas, stone, railway sleepers, discarded theatrical backdrops or old baker's boards salvaged from the beach near his home.
Taylor's vision was wholly his own. Friends like Gray often observed that his approach to making art always had the instinctive spontaneity of a jazz man. That much is true.
Alasdair Grant Taylor was born in Edderton, near Tain in Ross-shire in December 1936. His father, Hugh, was stationmaster at the local train station. His mother, Jane, a primary school teacher, was also a talented pianist who played in a small dance band which entertained troops home on leave. At the age of seven, her son began to accompany her on the drums.
In 1946, the Taylors moved to Coalburn, Lanarkshire. Alasdair drummed with bands while at school and, when he moved on to art school in Glasgow from 1955 to 1959, played in the art college's jazz band. He was also a talented footballer.
Taylor was involved in GSA's Student Christian Movement. According to Gray, he even flirted with the idea of becoming a monk, travelling to a monastery in England to investigate the possibility.
The heavily regulated, ascetic life a monk was not for the free-spirited Taylor, but he maintained a lifelong interest in spirituality and mysticism. In the 1970s, he even went to India to explore this further.
It all fed into his art.
In 1958, in his penultimate year at GSA, Taylor visited London to look at Rembrandt's Madonna and Child etchings. This led to a coup de foudre when, sitting in art house cinema, The Academy, on Oxford Street, watching films about Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Piero Francesca, he spotted a beautiful girl.
Years later, recalling this first meeting with Annelise Marquard during an interview with W. Gordon Smith for a Scope documentary on BBC Scotland, Taylor explained: "There were around seven people in the cinema, and there was this blonde girl sitting about four rows away, and I had to speak to her […] so I followed her up the street. We talked. We went to the British Museum. I found the original Madonna and child drawings by Rembrandt and we sat with guards round them and drew them."
The pair went on impromptu trip around the Highlands, causing alarm at the art school in Glasgow, that this talented final student was not coming back.
Taylor made it back in the nick of time, winning the prestigious Governor's Prize for his painting, The Expulsion of Eden, which featured Annelise. A year later, after he graduated, having sold his drum kit and, Taylor headed for Silkeborg, in central Denmark, to seek out Annelise. Despite opposition from her parents, horrified that this bearded, kilted Scotsman had turned up on their doorstep looking for their daughter, the couple married.
They ended up spending a year in Silkeborg and through Annelise, Taylor met Asger Jorn, a member of the CoBrA group of artists. Jorn exemplified the group's highly expressionist painting style, inspired by the spontaneity of children's art. Taylor absorbed these techniques like a sponge.
The couple returned to Glasgow in 1960. There, Taylor spent a miserable month teaching in Dumbarton before taking up a job as a bin man with Glasgow Cleansing Department.
Their next move, some six months later, was into the University of Glasgow's Chaplaincy Centre, where Alasdair had been appointed caretaker. This allowed him to concentrate on his art, while Annelise served food and drinks to students.
The Taylors spent five years at the Centre. Their daughter, Anna, was born in 1960, followed by another daughter, Jean in 1963. In late 1965, the family moved to Northbank Cottage, situated on an isolated promontory near Portencross in north Ayrshire.
Despite the lack of electricity and basic amenities, the cottage suited the young couple. They were charged a peppercorn rent to keep an eye on the landlord's potato fields. It also meant Alasdair could make work for various exhibitions in the outbuildings surrounding the 300-year-old cottage.
Ever-resourceful and a creative powerhouse in her own right, who kept the family going through lean times, Annelise took on part-time roles at various local schools and community schools.
Exhibitions came and went. Journalists chapped on his door frequently and critics came calling. Articles appeared in magazines as diverse as Scottish Field and in Women's Weekly, while in 1964, he made headline news in the popular newspapers of the day, when a controversial artwork, Umbrella Morals, featuring a naked woman, alongside descriptions of her body parts, was removed from an exhibition at the University of Glasgow pending a police enquiry on whether or not it offended public decency.
In the half-hour-long arts documentary, which aired on BBC Scotland in 1975, Taylor was filmed in and around Northbank.
One scene shows him almost in a trance-like state, talking as he worked on one of his distinctive car-spray paintings laid out on the floor. "It's like the paint speaks to you," he tells the camera.
Later, during a revealing face-to-face discussion with the presenter, Taylor admits to 'a feeling of failure' as Annelise had recently become main breadwinner for the family. Taylor is also asked if he thinks society owes artists a living. He ruminates before conceding: "I am not very good at being business-like in an economical sense."
This comment about the economics of the art world art hid another aspect of Taylor's views on creating art. According to his daughters, he thought of his paintings as being 'like children' and didn’t actively try to sell them.
Great art goes beyond hard cash. It touches people. Now, his family wants the wider world to know about this art. Which is why, 16 years on from his death, thanks to the dedication of Anna and Jean, and the commitment of The Maclaurin, the public is being offered the chance to appreciate a neglected genius.
This wide-reaching survey of Taylor's work will show the progression in his art over the years, as he moved into different stages and styles.
Alasdair Taylor's art is bold, spontaneous and free-spirited. It pulls you in and occasionally spits you out. It conceals more than it reveals. Above all, it demands to be seen.
Journalist Jan Patience wrote the following article for the exhibition about Alasdair and Annelise's life:
Watch below a short slideshow made for the retrospective, highlighting Alasdair's life in pictures:
For those interested in learning more about the retrospective and the artist's legacy, an enlightening interview with Jan Patience, Jean Camplisson, and Anna McCabe on Radio Scotland's The Afternoon Show. To listen to the interview, follow the link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001p0x6
You can also listen in to the Culture Scene Radio Show to hear more about the retrospective. (From minute 15), follow the link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0g3k750?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
Visit the exhibition in person until September 3rd 2023, Address: