Alison Watt
31 January 1990, Wednesday, Glasgow
9.00 Signing on — missed due to faulty alarm clock1.
How young-Toby hates the sound of that grey plastic alarm clock. It has woken him for ‘A’ levels and Finals. The meep-meep//meep-meep has accumulated terrors, over the past three or four years. Days which start with it do not start well.
Written this morning or this afternoon, a poem about a Scottish painter —
Alison Watt
How much can you tell about a person
from a photograph of them? Take this one,
published in the Observer Scotland on
the 28th of January
1990, of Alison Watt under
the headline ‘Woman who paints up a storm’.
Under the photograph is written the following:
‘Images of a classicist: Alison Watt
plans with purpose and severity./ Photograph
by Murdo MacLeod.’ The colours are beautiful;
a clement green and a terrific white,
the composition, classical, and the face
‘a pretty wee round face’ as the article
puts it. But also more – the winter blonde
hair is drawn back from the face like a curtain,
the eyes, perfectly lidded, are drooping,
the mouth, the brightest coloured object in
the photograph, is pale, orange-red,
and is pouting, the hands, which for some reason
are holding a loaf, have short nails, widen
from their tips to where they join the palm, are
not delicate. A gentle shadow glozes
the right of the figure, who sits in front
of one of her paintings. The whole thing seems sad,
sadder still as slightly ridiculous,
and very calm. This is a person whom
I would like to meet.
Should that last but one line ending be who or whom? I am still not sure.
Young-Toby never meets Alison Watt, who is three years older than him.
I wish I’d bought one of her early paintings. They were for sale in the exhibition I saw. Her self-portraits. Of course, I was counting pennies, and could hardly afford a catalogue. But I would love to have lived with one of her chalky, understated images for all this time. A Giorgio Morandi of the human face.
Young-Toby has already started a small art collection, if you can call it that. For his sixteenth birthday, he asked for a painting of Elstow Abbey by his art teacher, Mr Lynch. Mr Lynch had gone to college with Howard Hodgkin, but unlike him had continued to paint in a Euston Road/Paul Cezanne manner. Tentative brush-shaped dabs; restrained greens and greys; process visible. I still have Elstow Abbey, which hangs in my study, up and to my left.
It’s not surprising young-Toby is thinking about painting. But now that the room is finished, he can get back to the first novel.