CARBETH HUTS HELPED US GET OUT OF SLUMS

Renowned artist Jolomo reveals how enjoying the simple life near Campsie Fells helped him with his latest works in an exhibition that also depicts Glasgow tenements

BACK in 1971, celebrated Glasgow-born artist Dr John Lowrie Morrison won a travelling scholarship from the Royal Academy Schools in London. The scholarship was worth some £300 – a tidy sum back then.

Other youthful artists who were awarded the prize took themselves off on the Grand Tour – France, Italy, Holland. But not Morrison. He set his sights much closer to home: the huts at Carbeth, the community that had been established some half a century earlier, near the Campsie Fells.

“My parents had had a hut there, and so did many aunts and uncles and cousins”, recalls the artist known as Jolomo, “although that’s going back to the 1930s. We had a hut near the swimming pool – I was a lifeguard for many years there”.

It was, in many ways, a frugal life back then, but a hugely enjoyable one: endless amounts of fresh air and exercise, hampered not in the least by the fact there was no water or electricity, or that calls of nature were dealt with by means of a dry Elsanol toilet.

Carbeth and Glasgow form Jolomo’s new exhibition, and the process involved him reaching back to his formative years.

It’s called The Light Of Glasgow And The Huts Of Carbeth and its paintings, with their vivid, expressive use of colour, are a reminder of why, at 72, he remains one of this country’s foremost contemporary artists.

It’s an interesting move from an artist who, in his own words, has spent the last half-century painting Argyll and the Hebrides, lighthouses, coastscapes, croftscapes, and the people and light of the Scottish west coast. then you look at it, and you think, ‘That looks dreadful’.

“You’ve really got to work hard at it to get this feeling of not so much even their look; but what I’ve tried to do with these paintings is to get my particular vision of it, my memories of it – what it was like.

“The smoke coming out of the chimneys, for example – everybody had a wood-burning stove, and all that sort of stuff.

“But it’s always been a fantastic place. I just loved it. We used to go every weekend and on all the holidays. I think there were six members of our family there. There was all that kind of nice camaraderie. It was a lovely, lovely time. With these paintings I just wanted to show it off a wee bit.

“They’re not so much huts now as chalets – I’ve even heard one or two people refer to them as ‘dachas’and I think, ‘come on!”

The evocative Carbeth paintings in the exhibition range from A Hut With A View, Midhill, Carbeth, to A Winter Gloaming, Carbeth, a full moon in a chill sky overlooking spindly trees and a hut, a thin stream of smoke curling from its chimney.

Jolomo, who was born in Maryhill in 1948 (he coined the sobriquet during a Latin lesson at school, in 1962), studied at GSA between 1967 and 1971, but before he set foot in that gilded place he had already had his first exhibition, and sold his first painting (a copy of work by his grandfather).

It was in 1971 he developed his “distinctive expressive style”, with blue as the key colour. This was a busy period for him. He did a post-graduate year in fine art, then studied teaching at Jordanhill College in 1972-1973.

In 1973 he relocated to Argyll to teach. He combined teaching with art, and his first solo show came about in 1976. He and his wife set up home in Tayvallich in 1977.

The very first Morrison painting to be signed “Jolomo” was in 1985. He left Lochgilphead High as principal teacher of art in 1994, then worked as an adviser/education development officer with Strathclyde Region. He left education in 1997 to become a full-time professional artist.

His paintings of the west coast have made him famous and muchsought-after. What makes the area unique, he has always said, is the quality of the light.

Of his ability to depict vividly even the most seemingly neutral of shades, he said an interview: “That’s where I see the bright colours. Most people see them only peripherally. I make them a big part of my picture. Having said that, if you go to Iona, or any of the white sandy beaches up the west coast, the water is green. People say to me, ‘Where did you get the green water, son?’ I tell them to get out more. Go and have a look.”

Despite having lived in Knapdale for more than four decades, Jolomo has a soft spot for the Glasgow he once knew so well. In the exhibition there are paintings of spring blossoms in Park Circus Place; a back lane off Wilton Street; Kelvingrove, viewed from Park Terrace; and the demolition of