| Sunday Herald 13th July 2003 |
| Garage Sale |
| It may not be the new Paris, but struggling
artists are still finding ways to succeed in Glasgow's art community.
Stephen Phelan visits the Belvedere, a gallery set up in a private
garage in the east end |
 |
|
| A FEW weeks ago, Glasgow was rated the 11th most
bohemian city in the UK by the Demos think-tank. Not bad. But that's
'bohemian' according to their updated definition of the word -- ethnically
diverse, lifestyle- liberal and technologically minded -- rather than
the original term coined to describe communities of dirty and creative
free souls living cheaply, artistically and disgracefully in the no-go
zones of Paris. |
|
|
|
Cool as Glasgow may be, there is no quarter of the
city where you could expect to pay for your dinner with a painting,
sing filthy shanties with a writer and three prostitutes or start
a fist fight by arguing that art is merely the doomed dream of order
out of chaos. But that might be changing.
|
I'm at the opening of the Belvedere, Glasgow's
brand-new art gallery. It's on London Road, very close to Celtic
Park, but far from the rest of the city's contemporary visual
art venues. It's advertised by a small pavement sign saying simply
'paintings' and it used to be Jim Donnelly's garage, with a small
studio round the back for him to paint in. As of this afternoon,
however, it is an exhibition space for work by him and his friends
Peter Lafferty, a photo grapher, and Tommy Smith.
|
| Donnelly and Smith, known and respected as artists
in the east end, both sell bric-a-brac and paintings in the Barras
market. Lafferty has hung around the market for years, taking photos
and buying frames for them. |
|
|
| Feeling that 'times have changed' down the Barras
-- recent applications for Lottery and European funding have failed,
new residential developments are moving in -- and that there's nowhere
else in the area for local artists to show and sell their work, the
three thought they'd have a go with their own gallery. |
| 'Nobody's tried this in the east end before,' says
Donnelly. 'At the moment, it's just my own stuff and Pete's and wee
Tommy's. But if it works we'd like people to bring their own things
along. A girl already showed up looking to exhibit here, and we only
opened about half an hour ago.' |
| While we're talking, a woman decides to buy a painting
of three regulars in the Wee Man's Bar in Gallowgate, and a print
of the Clyde at sunset, both by Tommy Smith (the latter, I overhear,
was done during an evening drinking session down by the river). |
| Smith is not really used to selling this way. 'There's
no other place like this around this side of the city,' he says. 'Usually
I would hang my stuff in pubs and cafes and put a price on it. A bit
like the old boys in France, you know, when they used to do paintings
to get dinner or a bed for the night. |
| Fifty of Smith's paintings, most of which are renderings
of faded or enduring scenes of east Glasgow social history -- tenements
and shopfronts in the Gallowgate, old trams through Bridgeton -- are
on display in the Clutha Bar on Stockwell Street. He once crafted
a fine-detailed miniature sculpture of The Scotia Bar for Billy Connolly,
which apparently now stands in the Big Yin's London house. Jim Donnelly's
exuberant impressions of footballers and jazz musicans have sold for
thousands of dollars to American collectors -- including, it is said,
Robin Williams -- and appeared in Taggart and in Peter Mullan's film
Ruffian Artists. But they go for about £200 at home. |
|
|
| Maybe it's appropriate or inevitable that this art
should be most easily found in bars and markets closest to its sources
of inspiration. But for such well-regarded, popular, evidently commercial
local work, it doesn't really seem to take pride of place in the city.
|
| Talking about this over glasses of Hock and chunks
of cheese -- it's a gallery opening, but it's not exactly a gala event
-- we get to this question of being 'in or out of the loop' as Peter
Lafferty puts it. Aside from the odd barbed mention of not wanting
to 'schmooze about the art colonies' in the city centre and west end,
Lafferty and his companions seem pretty cheerful in their work. |
 |
 |
But they obviously agree with friend
and supporter Phil Fearns, director of local music and arts
promoters Roots 2 The Future, who argues that there are any
number of undervalued, under-represented, underappreciated artists
in Glasgow, particularly the east end, who lose out by 'not
knowing how to work the system'. |
|
| 'Let's face it, networking is how you get on in the
arts in Scotland,' says Fearns. 'Funding is obviously limited and
some artists just don't know how to get access to it, or put on exhibitions,
because they're busy being creative. A lot of the time, these are
working-class people, whose parlance doesn't necessarily help when
it comes to getting support.' |
| Ask around about the art scene in Glasgow and you
get the impression that there's not one scene, but many. Different
kinds of art, for different tastes, moving in different circles, with
considerable difficulty. |
|
|
| 'The number of commercial galleries is absolutely
tiny compared to the number of artists in Glasgow,' says Tony Webster,
co-founder of the city's Modern Institute. 'And each one is looking
for a very specific kind of work. We started because we felt there
was no place out there for the art we were interested in.' |
| The Institute charges up to 50% commission from artists
for the sale of their work, a practice which, the Belvedere has argued,
prices poorer artists out of the market. But Webster says the money
goes back into shipping and exhibiting the work overseas. 'We end
up spending as much money we make on our artists. And, like everyone
else, unfortunately, we have a niche. Although I hate that word.'
|
| Despite Webster's concerns that there aren't enough
galleries for the artists that exist in Glasgow, new spaces are opening
all the time -- and increasingly they're being located in the east
end. Joining the WASPS studios in Dennistoun (mission statement: 'To
stimulate public education and interest in art by providing low-cost
studios for artists') where the socially-minded Ken Currie is based,
are new projects such as the Switchspace group -- exhibiting new art
in various public and domestic sites -- and the Merchant City's £10m
Briggait Centre. Meanwhile, the Easterhouse Cultural Campus is due
to open in 2005. |
|
'I think it's problematic to think that way. As
artists, we're all in business and we're all in the same boat. You
could just as easily ask why there aren't any gall eries exclusively
for women. Why should there be? And if you think there should be,
you should start one.'
|
|
The work of the Belvedere artists might fall somewhere
between the internationally commercial art that sells in the major
galleries and the cutting-edge contem porary work that competes
for new exhibition spaces. But they have their own immense local
and popular appeal, and represent their own active and vibrant brand
of social art. If the new gallery works, it might create, and fill,
its own gap in the market.
|
'It sounds like a brilliant initiative,' says
Webster. 'The infrastructure in Glasgow isn't very good, but
that does mean that the opportunity is there to do your own
thing. People should set up the galleries they think should
exist. There are no rules.'
Dallas agrees. 'We need as many alternative
spaces as we can get. It's great when anyone starts a new
place like this that defines itself. I think that resourcefulness
is the best part of the Glasgow scene.'
The Belvedere gallery, according to Jim Donnelly,
will be opening 'three or maybe four days a week'. You'll
know when it's open: he'll stick the sign outside.
13 July 2003
|
 |
|
FOLK
ART- CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTISTS
