The Herald - The Herald Magazine
By George! A man ahead of his time
DESPITE having spent 10 years ruminating and writing at length about the life and work of George Wyllie, I still find myself surprised by the energy and output of this most singular of Scottish artists. Wyllie, who died in 2012 at the age of 90, began his career as a full-time artist at the age of 59, when many people (in non-Covid times) are considering booking a cruise around the Med.
Not for George Ralston Wyllie, the pull of the garden centre café or the push of signing up to look after his grandchildren two days a week. No, siree. When Wyllie left his job as a Greenock-based Customs and Excise officer in October 1980, he launched himself full pelt into Being An Artist. And he didn’t stop.
This year marks the centenary of the birth of George Wyllie, best known for his monumental temporary artworks, the Straw Locomotive (1987) and the Paper Boat (1989). Both works live on in archival material and in the collective memory of all who saw them in Glasgow and, (in the case of the Paper Boat), on tour to locations such as Dumfries, London, Antwerp and New York.
The Paper Boat even made it onto the front cover of The Wall Street Journal, when it sailed up the Hudson and into the World Financial Center in New York.
These “social sculptures”represent the tip of the Wyllie iceberg in terms of artistic output. He was a prolific maker, performer and writer. In today’s terminology, he was also an influencer; regularly appearing on air and on our screens.
Had social media been around when Wyllie was at his peak, who knows what he’d have done with it in a bid to spread his seriously playful and unpretentious art-for-all message?
On Hogmanay, on what would have been his 99th birthday, Wyllie’s family launched a new project called Mapping Memories – The George Wyllie Art Trail. The virtual art trail is now live and his elder daughter, Louise Wyllie, is calling on anyone who has a story about her father and his work, to post their memories online onto two different online noticeboards created for the centenary year.
Louise Wyllie explains: “The first board is called Mapping Memories and we are asking people to add a story, photograph, video, audio or link relating to my father and his work, while the second, Just For Fun, is exactly that. We’re asking for stories and pictures of wonderful, weird and wacky things which dad inspired people to do.
“We’ve had some great tales. These include pictures and stories about dad’s Monarch of Auchmountain Glen stag sculpture in Greenock, the saga of the big question mark sculptures along the Firth of Clyde at Langbank, erected as a tribute to dad in 2012 by artist Alec Galloway, and a terrific ‘wally dug’ audio tale by Graham Ross who, as a young architecture student at Strathclyde University, worked with him on The City as a Living Room project at The Arches in Glasgow.
“The Wally Dugs tale shows how ahead of the curve my father was… remember, this was almost a quarter of a century before architect Kengo Kuma said he wanted V&A Dundee to feel like the city’s living room.
“Dad got these architecture students from Strathclyde University to create two 15-foot high Wally Dugs – a staple of every Scottish hearthside at one point – out of white, backlit fabric – off-cuts from the Paper Boat and fluorescent strip lights powered by a generator. The ‘chain’ was my mum’s old garden hose! Then they toured the ‘dugs’ around the city.
“In Just For Fun, we’ve had some brilliant contributions. I love the A Bird is Not a Stone tattoo in tribute to dad’s Berlin Burd, which he sited beside the Berlin Wall in 1988.
“There’s also a letter which dad wrote to Sean Connery asking him to help pay for thousands of Saltire-themed Destiny plastic bags, which dad then gave away, as well as the drawing which The Herald cartoonist, Steven Camley, made the day after dad died and which I liked so much, I asked him if I could buy it to hang on my wall.”
Although he didn’t start getting wellknown in the art world until the 1980s, Wyllie had been making music, boats, gadgets and fancy footwork (as part of a dance act with younger brother, Banks) all his life. He trained as an engineer with the Post Office, but was always drawn to the creative side of life.
In the mid-1960s, inspired by an exhibition of the Italian Arte Povera movement at Kelvingrove in Glasgow, Wyllie signed up for a welding course at a local college and turned the basement of the family home in Gourock into a workshop.
It was, as he told his long-suffering wife, Daphne, Time For Art. He embarked on what he called a Ten Object Plan and his first sculpture was Mortgage Climbing the Wall, an intricate piece of metalwork which appeared to represent a creeping presence.
A blizzard of metal sculptures began to emerge based around odd bits of metal he found in scrapyards, the