efore achieving recognition as an author with the publication of Lanark in 1981, Gray was known (where he was known at all) primarily as a practitioner in the visual arts.

Always gifted at making pictures and stories, Alasdair Gray attended Glasgow School of Art between 1952 and 1957. There he specialized in mural painting, a form which seemed to match in size the scale of his imaginings. In his final year he was commissioned to paint a mural for the Scottish–USSR Friendship Society. Titled Triumph of Death, it was a modern-gothic depiction of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ based partially on the Crucifixion.

Gray’s next project was the decoration of Greenhead Parish Church in Bridgeton. Much of the artist’s experience of this project appears in Duncan Thaw’s narrative in Lanark. Sadly the church fell victim to the demolition fervour that consumed Glasgow in the sixties, with only a few photographs and colour transparencies remaining to contain Gray’s vision.

Following spells as a teacher of art, and as a scene-painter for the theatre, Gray was appointed Artist Recorder for the People’s Palace Museum in Glasgow. This work, which appeared as an exhibition in 1978, involved portrait work of famous and less than famous Glasgow citizens.

Today, however, the greatest audience for Gray’s art are the readers of his books, who can enjoy the exigencies of his visual imagination in the form of his illustrations and typography. Gray continues, therefore, to be an artist working in the visual as well as literary arts.

* Four examples of Alasdair Gray's paintings are available to view via the links to the right.