John Brown at Eighty

This exhibition, John Brown at 80, has prompted me to think back on my artistic endeavours over the past 60 plus years. As an art student, I was incredibly lucky to be studying at Glasgow School of Art in Macintosh's wonderful masterpiece, which regrettably is no more for the moment. I remember walking up the steps to the little narrow door and just pushing my way in and entering a completely different world of creativity and light and joy. I was particularly lucky to be in, for the first two years, a section where I was taught drawing and painting by Willie Bone, but he taught me to work with vigour and to be dedicated in a way that perhaps I wasn't before. At that time, I was also fortunate because Joan Airdley's wonderful memorial exhibition in the Kelvin Grove Gallery was on and that just blew me away, so I was doubly lucky there. I can remember a couple of years later when I had a little studio in a place called Porton Cross, which is just a few houses really, and it was on the Clyde Coast, where occasionally we would get stormy seas, but nothing like the seas that Joan Airdley painted, and of course I thought I would try to paint a sea painting. So the painting of the sea, which you can see hopefully, has vigorous brushstrokes, which I think influenced me in some of the other work that I was doing at the time. So there is the portrait of my girlfriend Libby, who then became my wife. The handling of paint on her blouse has that same kind of quality, I think. The next exhibition, still at Art School, was in the Royal Academy and it was Pierre Bonnard's retrospective big exhibition, which again blew me away. I was inspired by his vertical compositions. People in his paintings would wander in and out, but also his drawings, which were wondrous examples of mark-making. Apparently he drew with tiny little stumpy pencils, because he said if he drew with these pencils he felt as if the emotion was just coming through the ends of his fingers onto the paper, and so of course I followed suit and cut my pencils down and tried to make similar marks on my sketchbooks, which I still do today. The other person at Art School at that time who taught me was, well there were lots of other people, but David Donaldson. I painted the self-portrait which is in the exhibition of John Brown at 21 or something, and at that time David Donaldson was painting himself wearing a chef's hat. So just recently I've painted John Brown in a party hat as a nod to David Donaldson, just to acknowledge that my wife Libby died and I wanted to paint a picture to remind me of some of our life together. So it's a painting of memories and it's designed, it's composed on a series of vertical panels like the previous painting and a lot of Bonnard's paintings, and it reads from the bottom right-hand corner to the top left-hand corner. It's a narrative. There are her shoes left behind, there is the empty chair which she posed for the portrait all these years ago, there are flowers called scabies which were ones that she particularly liked, there's a little boat with both of us in it journeying through our life together, there are various objects which were meaningful to her in her life, and then there she is sitting in an evening window knitting for her grandchildren whom she would never see. And finally in the left-hand column part of the painting is eternity. It's a golden and she has become a blackbird flying free and I am wandering in the Elysian fields looking for her and right at the bottom are my three boys who are standing waiting under the tree. In 2004 the Scottish Gallery gave me my first solo show and my first exhibition is called Missing Venice and the painting I've chosen to represent that exhibition is called Traghetto Crossing. I became interested in the idea of people being ferried from one side of the Grand Canal to the the ferryman and the crossing and the people are standing up in these gondolas, they're a mixture of people with their dogs and their bunches of flowers and their children and all the rest of it. The next exhibition is called Fabrics of Kerala in the south of India and the painting I've chosen is Dusk over the Arabian Sea. The wonderful people there who are fishermen mainly, the men would go out fishing, the women would wait for them to come back and they would then sell the fish. The next exhibition to talk about in sequence is Mekong Life and I was commissioned by Pandao Ferries to do this exhibition, they sponsored me and I became very interested in the floating markets in Cambodia and Vietnam and Ducks and Cockerels too is the painting that I've chosen for that. You can see that all of these exhibitions are based on travel, this stems from doing my travelling scholarship after art school days and I was fortunate enough to get a residency, a Macintosh residency as it so happens in Colliure in the south of France. Colliure is a wonderful place, Matisse was there and of course Macintosh went there to recover from the smog of London but it's crawling with artists and it's very difficult to find a quiet spot and a different aspect so I've chosen this painting Port Vondre from Fort St Helm because I tended to retreat into the vineyards behind Colliure itself and then I went to Havana in Cuba. Yes, the streets were just teeming with life and I became interested in the theatre of the balconies and the life that was being played out on these balconies but the painting I've chosen is the one of street basketball, youngsters playing basketball in the street and behind them the faded grandeur of wonderful architecture and then there's Towards Abstraction which is mainly paintings from France, a place called Branche, south of Paris. I went there with a group of other artists for a week and collected the information. The painting I've chosen is a very abstract one, the exhibition is called Towards Abstraction and it even has a bit of a stick going through it as it was actually in the Trogeta painting as well. I had a small part in a group exhibition at the Scottish Gallery celebrating 180 years and I did a series of paintings from the Garden, I think mainly because of lockdown and so on. A Canthus is the painting I've chosen from that group and then there was Marrakesh. I went to Marrakesh in November or December I think it was. Morocco had got into the semi-final or quarter-final of the World Cup and so the place was buzzing with excitement. The painting that I've chosen for that is Dryer's Pigments. In the souks there are these wonderful fabrics that have been dyed and they're hanging to dry and this table shows the pigment that they use. Another group exhibition, Still Life, there's a party painting there but I think it's just called Birthday and so it fits in with the fact that this next exhibition now is to do with my 80th birthday. So the inspiration for this exhibition, John Brown at 80, is much closer to home. Somehow I didn't have the energy to go abroad again and find a new subject there so I did a series of drawings and paintings along the canals between Glasgow and Edinburgh and that formed one aspect of this exhibition. The next one was the allotments, mainly in Edinburgh although I did visit Sheffield and got some inspiration there so allotments was the second part of it. And the third part is my garden which you may have seen in the previous video but just walking through the garden here is the pond with tadpoles growing their legs and foxes and wildlife come and drink from it. Sweet peas are ready to go into the ground here and raised beds are showing some vegetables coming through and a bed full of strawberries, not ready yet unfortunately. Herbaceous garden is beginning to show poppies and peonies, some geum as well and later on there'll be dahlias and that kind of thing, agapanthus, and grasses here with digitalis and so on. And I say my garden in a lot of the titles for the paintings done here but it's not just my garden, it's a shared garden with my partner Andrea and we have shared nearly 25 years together now so it's a shared life, it's a shared garden. And you may say well what next? And I think next will be pottering around in the garden, sitting in the sun, reading a book, and standing mark making with my Bonnard pencils.