Why is the extraordinary painter, muralist, novelist, illustrator and socialist, Alasdair Gray, so little known? Perhaps, as he insists, it is because he is a Scot, marginalised and ignored by a London-based cultural establishment. Or perhaps it is because he is a radical, an eccentric sensualist, in love with the human body, with his community, with life itself. Or is it his deep sense of the spiritual combined with a barely contained rage against formal religion that makes him difficult to integrate? Perhaps it is all of these things. ...There is a tension in all Gray's work between his vibrant, impulsive imagination and his discipline and skill as an artist. And there is a tension, too, between an external world often brooding and dark (like Unthank) and the compassionate and intimate portraits that fill this book. They depict his friends, his neighbors, his fellow artists and writers, and the people he has loved. And they are set in his native Glasgow, in small comfortable rooms in a city he loves but does not romanticize. His best known image, Cowcaddens Streetscape in the Fifties, conflates space and time into a city both nostalgic and forgotten. Its ordinary life is still somehow full of mystery, as in his early painting The Great Beast in which women hanging out washing in tenement flats are transformed into creatures in a strange labyrinth. Like all his work, from the anti-war posters to the illustrations for his own and other people's writing, to the great murals, to the portraits that owe much to the 18th century Japanese painters, they shine with this usual "amazement at existence and a need to consciously grasp it while learning all we can". (http://socialistreview.org.uk/354/life-pictures Alasdair Gray (born 28 December 1934); Scottish writer and artist.... His artwork is held by museums including Kelvingrove & The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_Gray) undefined

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