Barely controlled chaos

Having successfully completed the portfolio preparation course, and been offered a coveted undergraduate place at Glasgow School of Art, my dyslexic son, whose reward for 12 years of schooling was three Standard Grades, a swimming certificate and a bad attitude to adults, has been asked to deliver a presentation to the new intake of fresh-faced, aspiring artists.

It's a massive leap beyond anything he's ever done. But he seems cool with it. "I know what I'm going to say," he tells me, in the kitchen of his Garnethill flat, as he rustles us up some pasta and quick-fried sprouting seeds.

"In the morning you make a list of things to get done during the day. You mostly ignore it. But it's there to stop you floating off and writing wee poems on banana skins."

"What kind of idiot would do that?" I say, having a fair idea of the answer.

"I was completely lost one day," he says. "Hadn't a clue what to do next. So when I'd written on the bananas I got yellow tape and stuck it all over my face. Then I went home."

He looks out the window at the steep banking, overgrown with grass, that passes for a garden in these parts. "I've had better days," he says.

"Worse too, I'd imagine," I say.

"Oh yeah," he says. "It's ups and downs as an artist. You have to like the rollercoaster."

Grabbing the frying pan, he decants a heap of still-sizzling seeds onto my small pile of penne pasta. "This is a great way to get good food fast," he says. "Bit of olive oil, dash of soy sauce, salt and pepper, fry for a few minutes. Fantastic."

"So what else are you going to tell the new intake?" I ask. "You want my help, by the way? I've been doing presentations forever."

"Nah, I've got it covered," he says. "If you're doing art, I'm going to tell them, you get lost all the time. How you deal with it is the thing.

"Some students in our class kept asking what they should do next. But that's not what the tutors are there for. Their job is to create an atmosphere of barely controlled chaos. And give you paint."

As I masticate his mung beans and pasta, and savour the surprisingly satisfying mélange of curly, crunchy, soft and squishy, I ponder this core message he's planning to convey. I'm not sure "barely controlled chaos" will go down well with the Art School staff.

But my experience is engineering, so I know about people, politics, deadlines and delivering. I know nothing about the art world. He does. Or seems to now. 

"Will they be happy with you saying that?" I ask.

"Yeah," he says. "They told me I'd got it, when I was doing the course. They said I was one of the key students, a benchmark."

He tosses this off casually. But to someone who got plenty of pain at school and very little pleasure, that has to feel good.

As I listen to him speak with some authority, I realise it also feels good to a dad who attended untold meetings of teachers, psychologists and school management, none of whom had a good word to say about the lad for 12 long years.

"Nice that, intit?" he says, nodding to my emptying plate.

"Lovely," I say. "Must try making it myself. So you were a benchmark?"

"Yeah," he says. "The tutors would quite often say, 'Take a look at what Dougie is doing'. Or rather 'Duggie', because they're English and can't say 'Dougie'."

"Did that annoy you?" I ask.

"Nah," he says. "I answer to anything - Doug, Doog, Duggie, Dougie, Dingly, Dongly. It creates confusion. I like confusion."

"Me too," I say. "A benchmark? Well, well. That sounds great. Is it something to do with you being a long, flat piece of wood?"

He laughs. "That'll be it," he says, picking up my empty plate and dumping it in the sink.

"Just call me 'Duggie the plank.'"

White room

"So I'm superfluous?" I say to my son as he's giving me coffee and a custard slice in the front room of his flat, overlooking Great Western Road.

"I was going to go for 'obsolete'," he tells me.

"Even worse," I say. "Either way you don't need my help?"

"Why would I?" he asks.

"I'm better at filling in forms than you."

"Not by much," he says, which is true. But you get used to trying to help your kids. The knowledge that they're as capable as you, maybe more so, takes ten years to penetrate, in my experience.

"Not to change the subject, but about this room," I say.

"What about it?" he says.

"'Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes,'" I say.

"I know," he says. "Except the sun shines here all the time. This is my studio. So I want it white and I want it minimalist. Lots of light, no distractions."

"Well that's what you got. But spend much time in here, you'll go snow-blind. Also you need chairs. My bum hurts already from sitting on the floorboards."

"You're too skinny," he says. "The human arse is supposed to be fleshy. It wants padding. You ain't got none. Eat more cakes and you'll be comfier."

"Trouble with that is you can't tell the calories where to collect," I say. "Suppose I stuff myself with custard slices for a month and the fat goes to the wrong place, like my head."

"Nobody would notice," he says. "There is something you can help me with, come to think of it."

"Yeah?" I say.

"Yeah," he says. "Personal statement for Art College. It's about who I am, what I've done, why I'm doing what I'm doing, and what I want to do in future."

  

"You any thoughts?" I say.

"Millions," he says. "But not sure how to write them so they make any sense."

"You talk, I write, you edit," I suggest.

"Fair enough," he says. "Well, I've always done art stuff. But if I was painting I used to try to make paintings."

"Pfff," I say. "How dumb was that?"

"It was," he says. "I'd get pissed off because they'd never turn out right."

 "So what's the alternative?" I say.

"Process," he says. "It's the big thing I've learned. Art is about the process not the product." 

"Sounds vague and meaningless to me," I say.

"It's not," he says. "It's perfectly clear. It's about having ideas, developing them, generating ideas from those ideas, linking back to other people's stuff. That's the process." 

"But surely you got to produce something or what's the point?" I say. 

You do," he says. "Lots of stuff. You just don't make that your main aim. You don't force it to happen."

He sips his coffee and looks out the window, towards Chinatown beyond the red flats. "I was talking to Stu Kidd about this," he says. "He's a musician so he got it right away. Said some of the tunes on his latest album with The Wellgreen had been dicking about his head for years."

"An album is a product," I say. 

"Course it is," he says. "But if he'd produced it when he first got the ideas, it wouldn't have been as good. I guess it's about stocking your brain with stuff and letting it percolate and form connections, then come out in its own good time."

"My point exactly," I say. "There's stuff in my head been percolating for decades. You should use it more."

"I was going to go for centuries, chief. It's too long. You're a bit like these custard slices," he says, picking one up and waggling it at me.

"Squishy and strangely comforting?" I say.

"Well past their sell-by date," he says.

Windows in the West

"Well that's certainly ruined my day," I tell my son as we stand in Saltoun Street, looking up at the block of flats that inspired the celebrated Glasgow painting, Windows in the West.

We've just finished a pleasant pavement lunch at Crolla's Gelateria on Byres Road, although he's pulled a muscle in his back and is quieter than usual. Until that is I offer to show him the original of artist Avril Paton's best-known work.

"You don't need to," he says. "I know it well."

"There it is," I say, as we turn left into a narrow road, flanked by parked cars and solid sandstone flats, their roofs forming, from our perspective, a large V in the sky, the vanishing point blocked by the paler stone of 60 Saltoun Street, right at the end.

"No it isn't," he says.

"Yes it is," I tell him. "I lived there on the top floor when I was a student 40 years ago, with my oldest friend, Ian Dalziel. You know Avril Paton has these little figures in some of her windows?"

"I really like those," my sister says. "It's a wee glimpse into people's lives. It's intriguing. You'd like to know what they're doing. You want to learn more about them."

"Well now you have," I tell her. "One of them was me."

"It couldn't have been you," my son says. "Because a) she didn't do the painting until long after you'd left. And b) that's not the block of flats she painted. Follow me and I'll show you the right one."

So here we are looking up at the sky-etched symmetry of number 35, with its round bow windows at either end and square-cut bay windows running up the centre. There's no doubt it's easier on the eye than number 60, but I cling to my illusions a little longer.

"That's not it," I say,

"It is," he insists. "She painted it from a flat above where we're standing now. Do you want to hear what she says about it?"

"No," I say.

"Yes," Sis says.

"It was something like this," he says, screwing his eyes half-shut to help him remember. "'On January 11th 1993 there came a sudden heavy blizzard. In ten minutes it was over and the view from the attic window at Athole Gardens overlooking Saltoun Street was transformed. The lilac pink sky, the lit windows, the clarity of whiteness where there had been darkness - it was magic.'"

"That's beautiful," Helen says, the poet in her moved by evocative words.

"It's annoying," I say, the codger in me moved by being wrong again. "I've been telling people for years I used to live in Windows in the West. Well that's certainly ruined my day."

"Surely it's best to know the truth," Sis says, trying as always to console me.

"I don't think so," I say. "Illusions are better. When we lived in this street, Ian and I had a friend called Charlie Dundas - a lovely guy with big brown eyes and an articulate, literary sense of humour."

"Fascinating as I find your reminiscences," my son says, turning back towards Byres Road, "I'm wondering if there's a point to this one."

"There is," I say. "Charlie was short-sighted but he would never wear specs. He loved the element of surprise, he said, that their absence brought to his life. 

"He would look at mysterious shapes in the middle distance and they might be giants. They could be unicorns. People walking towards him were Marilyn Monroe or J.D. Salinger, until they got in close. 

"Then he said something that has always stuck in my mind."

"What was that?" Helen asks.

"'Life is better when it's blurry at the edges.'"

Sex and chocolate biscuits

The tables on the pavement, as we drive past, tempt us to stop and try Montgomery's in Radnor street. But the menu offers little hope of solid Scottish sustenance.

"We got bagels, waffles, croissants, muffins, panini, pastries and gateaux," I read aloud from the menu. "With an 'x'. Clearly a cultured cafe. But I see no sign of eggs."

"You want to ask?" my son says. "I like it out here in the sun so I'm prepared to be flexible."

"For a change," I smile, getting up and heading for the counter at the far end of the high-ceilinged interior.

"Ask if they've any gluten-free food too," my sister calls after me.

"No," the well-aproned guy behind the counter replies to both questions, in an accent that tells me croissants were not prominent at breakfast, when he was a boy.

Cheese panini, assorted coffees and chocolate crispy biscuits keep everyone happy and we settle down to chat in the sunshine.

"You spoke to anyone yet about your feedback art ideas?" I ask my son.

"Nah," he says. "Still trying to work them out."

"I guess someone might steal them if you talk about them too soon," Sis says.

"That's not how it works," he tells her. "You share. You throw out ideas and people pick up on them. It's a great atmosphere at Art School."

"Sounds like my attitude to food," I say, reaching over, breaking off a piece of his panini and popping it in my mouth. "Food's communal. So is art, you're telling me."

"So is anything creative," he says. "It's a very human trait. Watch what someone's doing, copy and adapt it. Music's the same. 'I like that wee riff so I'll pick it up.' All this copyright just lines lawyers' pockets."

"Don't musicians need copyright to make money?" I say.

"Maybe the really rich ones," he says. "But I've a lot of pals who are musicians. They all share stuff."

"Do they earn much?" I ask.

"Not sure any musicians do. I guess the Stones get by. But Stu Kidd is a really good musician - plays with several Glasgow outfits. He makes a living teaching music. Dave Towers is a great saxophonist. He sells insurance."

"Some creative people make it pay," I say. "I've been earning a living from writing for 15 years."

"Yeah, but that's journalism. It's hard to make ends meet doing the pure thing. You sold your novel yet?"

"No," I say.

"There you are then," he says

"What sells books, I think, is coming to the end of a chapter and there's a puzzle," Sis says. "Dan Brown is good at that. Even if you don't like the story it keeps you reading."

"I was thinking of churning out a sex novel bestseller," I say. "To fund the writing I want to do."

My son chokes on his coffee. "What do you know about sex?" he says.

"I knew enough to make you."

"Anyone can do that. Look around - kids everywhere. Just because you can procreate doesn't mean you can write a bestselling sex novel."

"Listen laddie, I was young in the 1960s. We invented sex."

"Yeah but in those days it was five minutes, boys on top, roll over for a cigarette. People won't read that now. You got to stretch them. Tell them stuff they'd never think of themselves."

"We discovered the clitoris."

"That's like saying you discovered Auchinleck. It's on the main road. You can't miss it. What about the G-spot?"

"I've heard of it," I say.

"Not good enough," he says. "You got to be able to find it in the dark with handcuffs on. You have to play tunes on it with your fingertips. Can you perform an F sharp chord progression on a woman's body?"

"You're making that up," I say.

"I'm not," he says. "Have you taken part in a mozzarella sandwich? Can you do the chocolate chip muffin?"

"You're reading that off the bloody menu," I say.

"I am," he says. "But I'll guarantee people are doing them to each other right now, somewhere nearby. Face it chief, you can't write a modern sex novel. Not unless you get someone else to do the research and write up what they tell you."

I raise my cappuccino to my lips and study him in silence.

"Not a chance," he says.

I start to turn towards my sister. "Don't even think about it," she says.

"Oh bugger," I say. "You're right, of course. It's going to have to be the crime novel then. Does either of you know any bank robbers?"

Squishing

"You sure there'll be other men at this knitting hoolie then?" I ask Susan at the entrance to the old drill hall in Dalmenie Street, location of the first Edinburgh Yarn Festival. 

"Of course," she says.

"How many?"

"Two, maybe three."

"Counting me?"

"Probably."

"And how many women?"

"They're expecting 1500."

"I'll be conspicuous then."

"Nobody will be looking at you," she assures me. "They'll be too busy squishing."

Saying Susan is keen on knitting is like saying Romeo was keen on Juliet. Or George Osborne is keen on austerity. She adores knitting. If she felt as strongly about me I'd be scared. 

"Do you think I'm addicted to knitting?" she asked me, the other day.

"Of course not," I lied.

"Thank you," she said.

So when she asked me to chum her to the knitting festival, as her buddy had been taken sick, I couldn't refuse. But I wasn't happy.  

"Two guys and 1500 women?" I say. "Suppose I took you along to a meeting of the Cumnock trainspotters society, how would you feel?"

"You wouldn't do that," she says. "You stopped spotting trains when they got rid of steam, a hundred years ago."

"It's a hypothetical question," I say.

"I wouldn't mind," she says."I'd know they'd be weird, obsessive and uninterested in me."

"So that's what knitters are like?"

"Except we're not weird."

The lifesize cow just inside the door, its back carpeted with multi-coloured balls of wool, tells a different story. Knitted horn-warmers, one blue, one red, complete the disturbing picture.

"You can't tell me that's not weird," I say.

"It's creative," she says. "It's art."

"My son's an artist," I remind her. "We have meaningful conversations about art all the time. None of them involves woolly cows."

Inside the drill-hall the bustling scene takes time to process. Women, kids, tables, cakes, stalls, spinning-wheels and skeins of yarn of every colour. Thousands of them, stacked high.  "What's squishing?" I ask.

"Pardon?"

"You said they'd be too busy squishing. What is it?"

  

"It's what we do with new yarn," she says. "Take a look at the woman behind you." 

Blue jeans, no make-up, she is reaching for a hank of blue wool from the stall as I turn. First one hand squeezes the wool then the other, slowly, sensuously, like a cat stretching. Then she brings it up to her face and strokes her cheek with it. Her expression is rapt and dreamy.

"That's not normal," I whisper to Susan.

"It is if you're a knitter," she assures me.

I take another look. The woman's head is on one side now and her eyes are closed. She is still stroking gently. "I've seen expressions like that on women's faces," I say to Susan. "But not with a thousand other people in the room."

"And not recently," Susan says.

"True," I say. "But that's only because we have the lights out these days. Isn't it?"

"Of course," she lies.

"Thank you," I say.

Meanings

Never at his chattiest within an hour of waking, my son gives my question short shrift. "It's art. It's not supposed to have any meaning."

"If it hasn't any meaning, it's meaningless," I say.

"So?" he says, staring through the windscreen. 

I hesitate, knowing how questions bug him before the caffeine kicks in. "Well what's the point of something that's meaningless?" 

He turns to look at me now, not quite irritated yet. "What's the point of a tree?" he says. "Do you know what I mean? What's the point of a nice sky?"

"So it's about beauty then? I ask and answer it myself. "It can't be. A lot of art isn't beautiful. So what is it?"

"I don't know," he says, exasperated now. "I just make the shit." 

I laugh. "You're going to have to do better than that if somebody interviews you."

"Well yeah," he agrees. "You get your bollocks worked out before you talk to people. About 20% of this course, if I get in, is going to be ...."

"Theory?"

"Bollocks."

"It will be interesting though," I suggest.

He stretches and yawns widely. "I guess. But some people believe too much in the bollocks. If you make art you're an artist and what you make is art. That's all there is to it."

"It's a bit tautologous," I say.

"Nothing wrong with a good tautology," he says, as his aunt pulls up, gets out of her car and walks towards us, her face well-wreathed in wool. 

Some kind of neuralgia makes Helen suffer seriously in the cold, so she wore a balaclava for a while. But too many pulls by the police persuaded her to ditch it and buy scarves. Not nearly as cosy, she tells me, but you get arrested much less.

   

"My satnav went quiet suddenly and I could only hear it by putting my ear up close," she says. "Then I couldn't see where I was going and got lost. Are you fed up waiting?"

 "We're fine," I tell her. "We've been analysing art."

"I don't think you can analyse art," she says, as she climbs into the back seat and I pull away from the kerb. 

"Ha!" my son says. "That's what I've been trying to tell him, but he never listens, d'you know what I mean?"

"I certainly do," she says.

"Have you any idea how often you say 'd'you know what I mean?'" I say, aiming to divert them from the well-worn topic of my deficiencies.

"No, but it's a handy phrase," he says. "Turn right here and we'll park in the multi-storey, then walk to the exhibition.

"I'll use it if I get half way through a sentence and have no idea what I'm talking about," he continues. "Or if I just can't be arsed finishing it. Nine times out of ten, the person you're talking to will go, 'I do - I know exactly what you mean.'

"It's a great way to get a reputation as a deep thinker."

"Let me get this straight," I say, pulling into a parking bay on the ground floor. "Not only does your art not mean anything, but very often you don't mean anything either?"

"Spot on," he says. "Do you think you do?"

Objets d'art

"You going back to the office after this?" I ask my son over lunch in Antipasti.

"It's hardly an office when you've people standing on tables throwing paint at the walls," he says.

"Would have improved some of the offices I've worked," I say. "Studio then."

"Actually there is a resemblance to an office this week," he says. "One of the guys brought in an office chair and he's slowly cannibalising it for his work," 

I chew the thin, crispy pizza and spoon the froth from my cappucino. "Can you make art out of anything?" I wonder, and he gives me a look that says the answer's obvious.

"Of course you can."

"Surely not?" I say. "What about a slice of this pizza, two pregnant gerbils and a signed photo of Silvio Berlusconi?"

"Stick it on the wall that's art already."

"What about the collected truths of Tony Blair?"

"That would be minimalist."

"How about a steaming pile of horseshite?"

"Come on," he says. "Have you any idea the number of artists who've used steaming piles of horseshite in their work?"

"No," I say.

"Me neither," he says. "But it's a lot. Everything is raw material for art."

"Are you an artist?" says the waitress, come to collect the pizza crusts, and he gives her the smile that melts stones in space. She fumbles the plate and says "Sorry". 

"Just a student," he says and looks away.

The waitress lingers, acting busy with the crockery, but he's off somewhere in his head and doesn't turn back till she's gone.

"Lemme ask you something," I say. "Did you notice that woman serving us?"

"I saw her," he says.

"But did you notice her? Did you see that she liked you?"

"She did?" he says, surprised.

I shake my head. "You're missing several antennae, son. I've suspected it for a while. It's why you're still single."

"I'm still single because I saw one marriage up close and personal, when I was a boy. That was one too many."

"Good point. But they're not all like that." 

"Sure they are."

"They're not. Have you any idea the number of marriages that are perfectly happy?" I ask.

"No," he says.

"Me neither," I say. "But it's a lot. Loads of women make great wives. In fact women are the one exception to your theory about making art out of anything. You can't turn women into art ...."

He holds a finger up fast to silence me. "If you say 'because they're works of art already', he warns, "I'll disown you."

"I wasn't going to say that."

"Yeah, you were."

"Yeah, I was."

He shakes his head in sorrow and gets up to go.

Cycles

"See that bicycle wheel behind you," my son says, as we share a companionable coffee in the kitchen, the only space in his new flat not already silted up by art in progress or the tools he makes it with.

"I do," I tell him. "A fine-looking wheel, if incongruous in a kitchen. Is it concept art?"

"No, it's a bicycle wheel."

"It's just that I once saw a teaspoon painted pink in a picture frame," I tell him. "I was told that art is whatever an artist says is art."

He sips from his mug and makes a little moue. "What do you think of this stuff?" he asks, reaching for the packet and reading aloud: "'Brimming with Latin spirit, this is the perfect convivial coffee.'"

He tosses it on the table, spilling dark beans on the cream surface. "What does that mean?" he demands. "It's a daft phrase from a bad writer. 'Brimming with Latin spirit' my arse. It's just coffee."

"But a perfectly pleasant coffee," I tell him. "Give the guy a break. Words in the mind of a writer are like objects in an artist's hands."

He looks at me suspiciously. "Did you write it?" he asks. "Have you been bought by the marketing moguls?"

"Not yet," I tell him. "But I've written similar stuff. Words have sounds, sense and clouds of connotation. Good writers use all those. It's not just about meaning. What if I asked for the meaning of those decaying apples inside coffee-stirrer scaffolding you've got in the lounge?"

He flashes the smile that's warmed me since I first saw it thirty years ago. "I'd say it shows that creation and decay are complementary aspects of a single essence," he tells me. "But I'd know that's postmodern at best and probably bollocks. Art is process and ambiguity, not products and precise meaning."

"So is writing," I say. "Just not so much.

"But there has to be a core of connection," he insists. "Words need a hard wire to earth or those fluffy clouds will float them away."

"Unlike that bicycle wheel," I say.

"Exactly," he says. "That's about as grounded as you get. But it also carries a modicum of metaphorical meaning."

I drain the dregs, place the mug on the table and stand up ready to go. "Which is what?" I ask. "Without spokes there is no centre? Rubber makes the world go round? Enlighten me, oh wise one."

"Choose your own cheesy cliché," he tells me. "For me it's circles. My mum sends me five texts at three in the morning complaining I never talk to her. Which is annoying, so I don't answer. So she sends me five more texts, which is annoying so ... Everything moves in circles."

"Except rockets, arrows, bullets, planes, trains, automobiles, pawns, knights and bishops." I say, as he collects our coffee mugs and places them in the stainless-steel sink.

"Except those," he agrees, flashing the self-deprecating smile again. "But next time around they probably will."