The new George Wyllie Museum is a fitting tribute to a remarkable man

This would be part of a larger Inverclyde International festival of the Arts. Along the entire stretch of the UK’s most glorious esplanade the Greenock Fringe would proceed with street theatre, jugglers, musicians and magicians.

Carpathian dancers and Czechoslovakian mime artists would have a decision to make. Will it be up-itself Edinburgh this year and a tenner a pint and rental charges that would choke a horse, or Greenock on the Clyde Estuary and the gateway to the Islands glinting across that magnificent firth?

As yet, my Greenock festival isn’t even at the artisan latte stage of per-diem consultancy development. But what’s everyone waiting for? A remarkable flowering of artistic and cultural expression is proceeding across Greenock and Inverclyde.

On Saturday, the Firth of Clyde was offering majesty on a different class. And I’m driving down the motorway to see the new George Wyllie Museum on the Greenock waterfront.

READ MORE: New museum dedicated to visionary artist George Wyllie opens - what can we see there?

Jake McQuillan’s escapades in Just a Boy’s Game was my first introduction to Greenock. My second was a sodden winter Saturday in 1980 with a Celtic Supporters Bus to Cappielow Park, home of Greenock Morton. We’d stopped for booze and cigarettes on the way down and there before me was the Clyde at its deepest and widest. And what looked like islands. “One of them’s Arran,” I was told. How good would it be to live and work here?

In later years though, Greenock became disfigured and a wretched metaphor for Scotland’s industrial stagnation and urban neglect as first the shipyards went silent and then the deprivation and then came the drugs and violence which always follows in its wake. Look closer though, beyond the lazy, snap observations and multi-deprivation indexes. This is a beautiful part of Scotland which is producing art and culture on a shipyard scale.

The new George Wyllie museum, the Wyllieum, honours and bears witness to the life and work of one of Scotland’s most remarkable sculptors. The gallery, elegant in its gun-metal livery, sits within the Ocean Terminal was designed by the award-winning architect, Richard Murphy. It’s a fitting tribute to a remarkable man who began his artistic career when he was 59 and maintained it until his death in 2012 at the age of 90.

Mr Wyllie’s friend, Joan McAlpine, the former MSP was born and raised here and became a trustee of the foundation established to promote his creative legacy. She said: “When George was alive there was a feeling that some elements of the Scottish Arts establishment were a bit snooty about him. He was promoted by Richard DeMarco but excluded from more hallowed halls. Now he has his own gallery which is incredible and fitting. And it’s right on the Clyde, the river he loved so much.

“Millions of people disembarking from cruise ships will become familiar with his work - art that is at once international, modern and rooted in the culture of Scotland.

"His name will become even bigger in future. He will be recognised as the most important Scottish artist of his era - because he had something significant to say about the people, time, and place in which he lived. The Dunard Fund and Inverclyde Council have delivered something incredibly important and the building by Richard Murphy is stunning.”

The Wyllieum is located in Greenock Ocean Terminal (Image: free)

Most of us happened upon him when he made his straw locomotive which hung from the Finnieston Crane for six weeks in 1987 before being set alight to leave a charred question mark, a recurring motif in his work. Then there was his giant Paper Boat, launched on the Clyde in 1990 with the city’s iconic crane providing the backdrop before it embarked on a world tour: London, Antwerp and New York. I still remember getting off the bus at Buchanan Street and seeing his Running Clock sculpture outside for the first time and experiencing a WTF moment.

On each occasion I’ve walked past that hurrying clock I see children soliciting parents to stop for a closer look. What could be more pleasing and relevant for an artist than for someone to tell them later in life that a work of theirs had sparked an interest in art from childhood?

In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the rapid de-industrialisation of The Clyde was of huge concern and he addressed those themes in his art with the same humour and sense of pathos that Peter McDougall often deployed in his plays. Both were self-taught and would never have been considered sufficiently manicured for Scottish academia. They each came to prominence relatively late in life and their work drew on real-world experiences. 

Ms McAlpine said: “The Straw Locomotive and the Paper Boat paid tribute to Scottish engineering and industry, but were made out of impermanent material - paper and straw - to demonstrate the fragility of those skills. He loved the fact that the Paper Boat sailed up the Hudson River and featured in the Wall Street Journal.

“His first exhibition, a Day Down a Goldmine, was a comment on the destructive nature of the global financial system, and he saw that as responsible for in the decline of shipbuilding and our engineering skills too - the things which gave us self-respect and pride as a people. My dad served his apprenticeship as a marine fitter at Scott’s yard in Greenock and loved boats, so George’s work was really personal to me and many similar families on the Clyde.

“George himself had been trained in those engineering skills. He received an excellent technical education at Allan Glens School in Glasgow the 1930s, something that no longer exists. He was there at all the important moments in Scotland’s recent history and supported the creation of a Scottish parliament.”

On Saturday, I approached the Wyllieum following a walk along that sea-front from the Beacon Arts Centre, a few hundred yards down the walkway near where the glorious Custom House sits. The Beacon had opened with a retrospective by another Greenock native, the renowned maritime painter, Jimmy Watt whose paintings of the river and the vessels that sailed on it hang in collections all over the world.

READ MORE: New museum ‘cements legacy’ of George Wyllie in docks where he worked

His daughter, the celebrated painter Alison Watt, is currently curating a show of works at the McLean Museum & Art Gallery which is home to one of the UK’s finest collections of post-impressionist art. One of Britain’s most poignant pieces of war art rests there too, a patchwork blanket inscribed with the names of every child killed in the Greenock Blitz on the nights of May 6 and 7, 1941.

In neighbouring Gourock you’ll find the workshop of Alex Galloway, one of the world’s most respected stained glass artists. He’s in the vanguard of a revival of this sacred art and thus ensuring that the skills of making, restoring and repairing these treasures is preserved and maintained. Mr Galloway, along with the architect, Bruce Newlands and Finlay Campbell is spearheading a campaign to resuscitate one of Greenock’s most dramatic architectural landmarks, the Glebe Building, a former sugar refinery shaped like a giant iron, on Kerr Street.

Their plan is to re-configure it as a creative hub containing a school of stained glass. Earlier this year, he told the Greenock Telegraph: “The Glebe is iconic in Inverclyde. It's a fragment of the industrial heritage of the area and has such an interesting history. If this project comes to fruition, it will be an amazing demonstration of how historic buildings can be saved when you go through the process in the right way. 

According to Joan McAlpine, George Wylie would have been delighted to see this flowering of the creative arts in his beloved Greenock. “The activists working to transform the place, such as the Rigg Arts community project, the glass artist Alec Galloway and architect Bruce Newlands are very much in George’s tradition: they understand the interplay of ‘Folk, Place and Work’. George would have strongly approved of their campaign to save the iconic Glebe industrial building.”