Alasdair Gray
Better-known as a novelist, but also a muralist, playwright and illustrator, Gray's work includes the frontispieces for his own Lanark.
Alasdair Gray's best-known productions as a visual artist are his graphic illustrations for his own books, and he is interested in a tradition of writers who have also illustrated their own work, including William Blake and Rudyard Kipling. In this exhibition, Gray is represented by two groups of prints: one is from a set of illuminated versions of his own poems, made between 1967 and 1971; the other is based on the illustrations for his celebrated novel Lanark, published in 1981.
Both groups of prints were created from originals made with scraperboard and ink, and feature the combination of precise line and phantasmagorical subject matter that are characteristic of Gray's illustrations (as well as of his murals). They also contain motifs that have recurred within the artist's work; as he has observed, "on inventing a figure of the sort I call 'a moral emblem' I keep using it again and again". The poems that Gray has illustrated are from a cycle entitled In a Cold Room, 1952–57, written in response to the death of the artist's mother. The illustrations for Lanark are in fact a set of frontispieces produced for the different parts of the novel, a postmodern portrait of the author and his native city, which Gray began to write in the 1950s.
Alasdair Gray was born in 1932 in Glasgow, where he still lives. He obtained a Diploma in Design and Mural Painting from Glasgow School of Art in 1957, and since that time has been producing mural commissions as well as portraits and illustrations. Gray established a parallel career as a writer, producing plays for radio and television in the 1960s and 70s, and has published many novels and other books since the international success of Lanark.
Alasdair Gray's official website: A Continuing Magazine of Material for Readers, Students, Journalists and Theatre Folk Interested in Alasdair Gray's Work
Wikipedia entry for Alasdair Gray
Alasdair Gray at the British Council's Contemporary Writers
Lanark 1982, an unofficial Alasdair Gray website
Alasdair Gray's blog