Kelvingrove's Dali: A daunder down memory lane

I have been visiting it since the 1950s in differing circumstances but always with a jag of joy.

We first met when I was four. I was a sickly child. A bout of pneumatic fever had kept me in hospital for months. I was released into the wilds of St George’s Road with the proviso that I returned to the children’s hospital at Yorkhill for biannual check-ups.

These were a holiday for me. I suspect that they were too for my mother. For one day, twice a year, she escaped the other four siblings with only me for company. I had my mum to myself.

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There was metaphorical bunting hung over my dodgy ticker and a shed in my hair, my coiffure kept in place by liberal application of mater’s saliva. It was the Glesca answer to Vidal Sassoon products.

The details of the medial tests are lost in time though the taking of the blood sample has the capacity to chill me 60 years on. Panic can lodge in the childish breast and remain there, largely dormant but occasionally, suddenly, violently alive.

But happiness has a home there, too. After the blood and inevitable snotters, we walked down the hill and into the gallery. It was, and remains, wonderful. The stuffed animals were the attraction but the most dramatic sight for a child (well, this child) was the painting, Christ of St John of the Cross by Salvador Dali, that loomed over one to powerful effect.

Memory insists we dallied in the gallery for some time. This seems reasonable. Mum would not be keen to go back to the day and night job. I was totally entranced. There was, though, time for ice cream before walking home. It was the sort of day that Lou Reed would write a song about. After rehab, of course.

The trips had two lasting effects. In truth, I only became fully aware of them later in life. The first was the importance of spending time with those one loves. My son, daughter, and my grandchildren have thus accompanied me on trips to Kelvingrove. It must be said that some preferred the ice cream to the culture but it’s all time enjoyed, time shared.

The more individual effect was to introduce a working-class child to art. The suits of armour, the stuffed wild cat, the model ships all held their charm and still do. But it was that confrontation with Dali that proved the most significant and has endured for more than half a century.

Salvador Dali and Tom Honeyman

It prompted the thought that art could be exciting. The intervening years have strengthened my personal conviction that art must be exciting. It showed that appreciation could be visceral but would be enhanced by further study. It has led to a series of epiphanies.

My art education has been a blessing in my life. Trudging through the world in the wake of footballers, golfers or tennis players has allowed me to spend pre-match down time in galleries from New York to Margate. It has also, incidentally, led to a brilliant, insightful discourse on modern art from John McEnroe who spotted my Musee D’Orsay carrier bag and broke off from the contemplation on Rafa’s chances at Roland Garros to extol the virtues and significance of the Impressionists.

There have been many symptoms to my art mania. None, it should be said, involved a facility with a brush or deep insight or even understanding of genius. I am condemned, it seems, to conjure up variations of “I know what I like” when facing a masterpiece.

In mitigation, though, I have been open to instruction. There was a moment at a Picasso exhibition in the Grand Palais when a gentleman spoke, unbidden, into my ear of the precise reasons that the painting I was facing was so important. He was a lecturer at Glasgow School of Art. He recognised me from my byline picture. He knew of my capacious ignorance by reading what appeared below it.

There was, too, the personal guide in Malaga who made a visit to Picasso’s home and museum seem as organised as an after-hours party in Partick and just as much fun. I learned so much from her that I even remembered some of it.

Then there was the young woman guide in St Petersburg who told me she could whisk me around the Hermitage museum in the afternoon available to me or she could discuss one painting. I chose a Rembrandt.

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She told a story of such wisdom, knowledge and fluent erudition that I was stunned, remaining as silent as Gavin Williamson on University Challenge, before emptying my pockets and giving her a ball of oose, a receipt for a Russian doll and, mercifully, my entire haul of US dollars.

She seemed pleased. Almost as much as my maw on her away days to Kelvingrove who had, unwittingly, led me to the banks of Neva.

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