Avril Paton made her name painting Glasgow scenes and, as Deedee
Cuddihy reports, one of her latest works, a portrait of a tenement and
its inhabitants, has attracted a lot of attention
ANNE MENDELOW, who owns the Gatehouse Gallery at Rouken Glen Park in
Glasgow where Avril Paton has been enjoying a huge success with a show
of her most recent paintings, tells a story about an afternoon she spent
with the artist earlier this year.
''We were in the Winter Gardens at the People's Palace having tea or
something and I was chatting away when I noticed that Avril was hardly
listening to a thing I was saying; she was constantly looking past me at
all the activity that was going on around us.''
No doubt Avril was sizing up her surroundings, seeing if she could
make a painting out of them. And if she ever does do a Winter Gardens
scene, it will be interesting to see who buys it, for it was the
People's Palace a decade ago which had the foresight to purchase the
work which marked a turning point in Avril Paton's career.
Thousands of people know the painting by now, although not all may
have noted the artist's name. It's called, simply, The Barras 1984 and
has proved so popular that postcard and prints eventually had to be made
of it to satisfy all the punters who wanted copies for themselves.
Since then, Avril Paton has gone on to paint other vibrant Glasgow
scenes, Paddy's Market (a number of times), the garden festival (several
times over), Pollokshields allotments, a crowded concert at the Tramway
theatre, and to more acclaim than that first Barras painting, the
spectacular Windows in the West. It's been on loan to the Gatehouse
Gallery but has, in fact, already been purchased by Glasgow Museums for
the royal concert hall.
According to Anne Mendelow (who says she could have sold it several
times over during the current show -- and for more than the original
#10,000 asking price), the painting has been known to gather bigger
crowds during intervals than the concert hall bars.
You can understand why. For Windows in the West (as in the West End of
Glasgow) is a near perfect portrait, not only of a handsome tenement
building but of its inhabitants, glimpsed through the windows of their
flats, going about their daily business.
The detail is fascinating: children playing in a ground-floor
sitting-room; a young man working at his desk; a drinks party in
progress; a cat in a dining-room where the table has been laid for
supper.
You feel you could look forever but never see it all.
Even better, it's a portrait of a real tenement (in Saltoun Street
behind Byres Road) and real people, many of whom the artist knows
personally.
Avril lives right across the street from the building in an attic
flat. In fact she's included herself among the guests at the drinks
party and can be seen, back to the window looking towards her host.
It took the artist more than four months to complete Windows in the
West and she was surprised to discover, once the painting was finished,
that no-one living in the building had been aware that they were under
such intense scrutiny.
Although it was originally planned that the picture would receive its
first public outing at the current show, Windows in the West was taking
up so much space in Avril's flat that Anne Mendelow cleverly suggested
they should lend it to the royal concert hall in the meantime.
However, reaction to the painting was such that Glasgow Museums
decided to buy it, to the delight of everyone (apart, that is, from
those few well-heeled individuals who saw it at the Gatehouse Gallery
for the first time and were also dead keen to purchase.
Not surprisingly Avril has been deeply gratified by all the fuss over
her most ambitious painting to date.
''I've never had a response like this before -- even to the Barras
one,'' she says.
''The picture has done exactly what I aim to do with my work -- it has
'spoken' to a broad spectrum of people; not just people who know about
art but people who feel they haven't got a clue about art or are even
scared of it.''
She isn't sure why this style of painting -- this marriage of
buildings and people -- that she's developed over the past decade is
proving so popular (over #30,000 worth of paintings -- excluding Windows
in the West -- were purchased in the first few days of the show).
''I've always painted people,'' says Avril, who comes from Arran and
whose parents and grandfather were also artists. ''But I didn't realise
how important architecture was to me until I started painting the
Glasgow pictures.
''It was only later that I remembered the books which had fascinated
me as a child. There was an encyclopaedia of art which I loved and, no
matter how many times I looked through it, I would always come across
something I hadn't noticed before.'' (An important feature of Avril's
own work, as it happens.) ''And there was also an encyclopaedia of
architecture which I dipped into almost as often.''
Avril paints what she calls ''situations'', and a situation she has
returned to a number of times in her work is Paddy's Market.
She's well aware that some people can only see the negative side of
Paddy's, but for her it represents what could unashamedly be described
as ''life's rich tapestry''.
An inveterate wearer of second-hand clothes -- only the best mind --
and seeker out of objets trouve (''I love the fact that they've had a
life before me,'' she explains), Avril says that at Paddy's Market
''there's always a chance that you're going to find a treasure''.
* Avril Paton's exhibition continues at the Gatehouse Gallery,
telephone 041 620 0235, until October 27.
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