What a Life. What a Gift.

Mark Gilbert (2020)

Dad was many things, husband to our late mother Pat, father to myself, Paul, Bruno and Danny and grandfather to Katy and Murphy. He was also, in his time, a sailor, a pig man, a scenery painter and an art teacher.

Over time, these roles informed and fuelled what he was most of all, an artist, a dedicated, passionate and wonderful artist. Dad chose to paint, correctly assuming it would be a vocation that would sustain him for life. The world he recorded was intimate: his family, friends and their surroundings, in the settings of our homes in the south side of Glasgow and on holidays in the Highlands or France. From these sources, he created a joyful world of colour and beauty - one writer many years ago commented: ‘It’s always carnival at the Gilberts’, a line often quoted ironically at Dad by our mum. However, his devotion to his family is mirrored in his work – each and every painting and drawing was an act of love and compassion for the people he painted and the world he experienced. As such, Dad’s pictures are a tender and affectionate testament to his life and the relationships that nourished him.

The development of the pictures over the years parallels the changes and events in his life. His early paintings seem to resonate with the grey, muted tones of post war Britain. These panels are unembellished, depicting domestic settings that I often felt chimed with the sensibilities of playwrights like John Osborne and the other “angry young men” who focused on the personal and intimate aspects of working class Britain in the 1950s. The smaller, uncomplicated pictures gently evolved, over time, into larger vivid compositions, their colours, clashing and melding within linear, patterned and decorative structures. These later pictures seem very un-Scottish in style and potentially echo his roots in Trinidad, where he was born in 1926, to Scottish parents. Permeating his whole oeuvre is his unique vision resulting from years of dogged dedication and commitment to his craft and practice.

His subjects are often highly coloured figures, woven into equally vivid patterned spaces. Although the people are easy to perceive and are the focus of attention, they are rendered with the same weight of line, colour and flat texture as the setting in which they are depicted. This rigorous evenness of treatment can be disquieting for those in search of greater physical or emotional form to their figurative paintings. Nonetheless, it makes for complex, yet coherent, compositions where every element is, as Dad described it, at peace with the rest of the picture. The paintings are generous, open hearted and full of optimism. He began each picture believing it could be his best, yet characteristically, he recognized he could do little to control how people would respond to his work.

I often reflect how we as a family took the pictures and the act of sitting for him for granted. My brothers and I grew up in houses where there was always a studio in which Dad would spend most of his time, quietly working. We all sat for him as he drew us. Sometimes he’d dress us in his own checked trousers and striped rugby tops. More often than not we’d be pictured together or with Mum, friends and girlfriends. Being drawn was a constant part of our lives. We all spent innumerable hours sitting for him in the silence of his studio, the quiet punctuated by the squeak of his charcoal being dragged across the paper, creating the clean deliberate lines of his studies. As a child, the moment he announced he’d finished his drawing, I’d turn and dash from the studio before he could change his mind. Later, when I started attending Glasgow School of Art myself, I’d sit with Dad after he’d finished and we would discuss the drawings he’d just made and the composition that was gradually being constructed on the easel.

I also painted him. Portraits of both Mum and Dad featured in my degree show at GSA in 1991. After I graduated, I continued working in a studio in Glasgow. For the following nine years, it was not uncommon for Dad to sit for me in my studio in the morning and for me to sit for him in his in the afternoon. As we worked, we talked about our pictures and contrasting methods. He would puzzle over my liberal ‘turgid’ use of paint and the squalor of my studio, his being a pristine space he swept every day. In later years, when I moved to the US and then Canada, we would talk about our work during the multiple Skype conversations we would have each and every day. Sitting at our computers, we would view each other’s work through the screen and discuss what was working and what wasn’t. And we’d talk about my late mum, exchanging anecdotes that were poignant but often filled with humour and laughter. Paradoxically, these conversations were often triggered by discussions of the extraordinary drawings he made of her as he kept vigil during the last week of her life, which transformed his own deeply private experience into shared depictions of love, caregiving, end of life and bereavement. They taught me more than anything else about the healing power of art. He cherished these drawings and the memories they generated about Mum, who had done so much to support him over the years. Reflecting on the images, he poignantly stated: “At one point I did say, there’s no point in doing them because I can’t show her them. I can’t ask her what she thought of them.” I also know this feeling, for I too have lost my favourite most trusted audience and affectionate critic.

Mum died in 2016. The trio of paintings he created - Chair, Chair II and Chair III - stand comparison with anything he ever did, but are instilled with a unique pathos and poignancy. They echo the compositions he did of her in the years before she died, but now her Parker Knoll chair is empty, draped in the same patterned blanket that first appeared in his pictures in the 60s. These works, along with the drawings, were recently published in a book, Pat: End of Life Drawings by Norman Gilbert.

The media coverage these drawings of Mum received and the popularity of the BBC Loop film made about his life and work (which has been viewed seven million times online, not a few times by Dad himself) brought him letters and messages from admirers around the world. It also coincided with two near-sellout exhibitions at the Tatha Gallery, in Newport-on-Tay on the east coast of Scotland.

The success was hugely gratifying if slightly bemusing; clearly, though, he loved the response his work was now receiving and he was gratified to see the response to his earlier work much of which he had barely looked at himself in recent years. Now he was given ample reason to reappraise it, musing happily: “I seem to have a lot more good pictures than I thought I had”. Meanwhile, the artist who sought to make every picture better than his last was succeeding in spades; his work through his eighties and nineties and, perhaps particularly, after Mum’s death, becoming ever more intricate, cohesive and “at peace”.

Dad’s legacy lives in the body of work he leaves, paintings that testify to the importance of relationships and love as witnessed through his unique passion, vision and spirit. That legacy will live on beyond us all. What a life. What a gift.