Gray books a dream exhibition
IT is the “splendid” home of books and learning where one of Scotland’s greatest living writers and artists first ignited his capacious imagination.
Now Riddrie Library, where Alasdair Gray voraciously read and worked as a boy, is to be a gallery for his art.
The author, playwright and artist has one of his best known works of art, Cowcaddens Streetscape in the 1950s, hanging on its walls, as a long-planned project comes to fruition.
Gray, 82, who is currently in a wheelchair as he recov- ers from a serious fall he suffered last year, is to exhibit more of his art work in the library and turn its high walls into a gallery.
He wishes to add some portraits of “Glasgow people”, including one of scriptwriter Susan Boyd, and a large painting, A Charm Against Serpents.
The Cowcaddens painting was offered as the first painting for the gallery by its owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, and its display arranged by Alyson Niven, library manager of Glasgow Life.
Gray – who said his “paraphrase in prosaic rhyme” of Dante’s Inferno, in three parts, will be published late this year by Canongate Books – said: “It was the owner’s idea, she wanted it hung in a public place and she wanted it here, because she knew it was my library from primary, through secondary and into my early Glasgow School of Art days.
“It was favourite seat of learning, this library, so I was very pleased about the idea. I first came here when I was 11 or 12, I was a voracious reader: of course I started off in the children’s section but if you were sufficiently studious you could borrow from the non-fiction in the adult section – I wasn’t much interested in romance or crime, but I was interested in geography and biography and much else, so I got a great deal out of it.”
The Cowcaddens painting will be hung at the library for a year.