Glasgow

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Alexander "Greek" Thomson`s Caledonia Road Church
 -taken from Gavin Stamp`s book (Lawrence King 1999)

Glasgow

Places to visit this time...

I`m pleased to be going to the south side. I see that I can walk along White Cart Water from Pollock House passing Holmwood House to Snuff Mill Bridge in Cathcart. The distance is just under 8 miles so it is best to do it over a whole day with lunch on the middle, or even over two days, as there are the buildings themselves to explore. Polock House has some an El Greco.

I cannot quite"get" the scale of Glasgow. It is very grandly planned, with some huge buildings, and it doesn`t seem suited for idly strolling. The areas outside the listed Victorian centre can be spectacularly bleak. London seems more human-scaled, and New York seems to invite wandering more too. 

I tried working from the buildings of Thomson`s buildings before, believing their deeply sculptural forms would translate well into painting, but if the sun isn`t strong their sculptural qualities lose out to the patchy effect where clean stones break up the sootiness on their facades. It can also be challenging to find an easy place to work from, but perhaps I`ll be more fortunate this time.

I have always found Glasgow to be an extremely mysterious place, perhaps partly because so much of it was demolished and because it`s economic purpose was lost. So one can feel when wandering about Glasgow that one is  looking at a faded photograph, with some parts lost to time. That`s one reason why I love A Very Quiet Street, by Frank Kuppner- it deals with the past, with architecture and equivocation. 

Holmwood House (Alexander "Greek" Thomson)
Pollock House (Art Collection and park)
Caledonia Road Church (Alexander "Greek" Thomson).

I am also looking at walking along the River Kelvin.

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