‘Dire Green Place’ by Struan Kennedy

Alistair Strachan: Glasgow’s Charing Cross

With a name like the Royal Glasgow Institute for Fine Arts attached to the Kelly Gallery you might expect a weighty authority and grandeur to the building. However the Kelly Gallery is a very modest one-room speck in a little offshoot from Sauchiehall Street.

This should do nothing to deter a true follower of art, as he/she should know that in order to follow art one must sometimes tread the sideways as well as the highways. The fact that the building doesn’t measure up to the homogenised, European concept of ‘royal’ makes for a refreshing change. The true measure of a building cannot be taken without considering its contents and it is these, which I should like to discuss.

Within one room the gallery managed to house both the far-flung destinations (Manhattan, Singapore and Hong Kong) and the local subjects of Alistair Strachan’s urban landscapes. Whilst much can be said of the foreign subjects I would like to focus on his large scenes of Glasgow’s Charing Cross, as I believe them to be the stylistic epitome of the series. A word of caution to those who would chase down this man’s work on the belief that he produces quaint documentaries of clearly defined Glaswegian humility. Rather than showing us the Dear Green Place he chooses for his time the dead of night making the wistful parks and tree lined avenues a forgotten thing. Not only are lighting conditions quite poor but also when light is present it is harsh and unforgiving. All the cherished formal elements of landscape art are pitched against one another. It reminds me of Simon Schama’s comments on Van Gogh’s ‘The Night Café’ (1888). It was Schama’s view that both colour and shape have no respect for each other, they jostle and jump like drunks looking for a fight. This analogy has particular relevance to Strachan’s scene itself. You don’t have to be in Glasgow for long to see how art can effectively resemble life. His Charing Cross heaves itself around with the same swaggering confidence as some its actual midnight characters. So complete recognition is sacrificed for an associated emotional climate. The price we pay for this climate is to concede that light, the bringer of sense and reason, may have betrayed its traditional intention. The eye, overwhelmed by the sickly excess of light, can only fail to accurately register all of the individual features. So what is perhaps expected to be a coherent scene in fact results in the eye letting go of trying to process the lights and simply letting them wash over it. It is as if Charing Cross and its garish accessories are refusing to sit still for its picture, fidgeting like a child whose photograph comes out littered with smears and blurs. And yet it is entirely possible to pick out some signs of life. In ‘Charing Cross in Heavy Rain’ for example a solitary car (quite possibly a taxi) trundles on lonely into the night driven around the bend perhaps by a Weegie Travis Bickle.

Technically the paintings come across as deceptively simple. When one looks at the range of techniques used one can appreciate just how physical form and thematic function can operate in tandem. For it looks as if these works have been literally exposed to the elements. Paintings of the street are almost painted with the street. They conjure up the street’s various loose fluids; paint sprayed as if from a hypodermic syringe, sweat tracked down it, tears, spit, piss, spilt lager and streaming mascara. Its surface is like a weathered panel of MDF left outside shops and flats absorbing every urban vapour and even the screams and songs that hang thick in the night. And all caked on with debauchery as a binding agent.

This series demonstrates that from small rooms we can receive big ideas and from usual subject matter we can receive a surprisingly rich source of emotion. Strachan’s Charing Cross scenes illuminate the fun and frivolity that sometimes skip down the street hand in hand with casual violence. We are perhaps encouraged to lose our sober perception, shake free reason and not try and hold steady this shaking image before us. In a gesture of inebriated empathy we can thrust ourselves into the real Charing Cross. Accuracy is then reached by dulling our vision. By viewing through scratchy eyes in the wee hours, blotted and blotched with maudlin induced tears- not wiped away but allowed to gather and cloud in the eye and obscure one’s reality.