Between 1984 and 1994, the artist Sue Jane Taylor recorded the life onshore and offshore, of men involved in the oil industry in Scotland. This essay sets Taylor’s work in the context of Scottish art and, more widely, the history of art as it relates to human beings involved, often in extremis, in hard manual and physical labour.
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Scottish art falls, by and large, into the category of the genteel, epitomised by the belle peinture of the mid-twentieth century Edinburgh School which dominated ways of seeing Scotland and its landscape. But running parallel to this world of landscape, seascape and still-life is a different vein. Scotland industrialised early; its reserves of coal, iron, labour and its developing communications infrastructure encouraged a rapid urban expansion in the nineteenth century when traditional ‘heavy’ industries such as coal mining, ship-building and foundry-work reached their peak.
The advent of the First World War led to even heavier industrial activity, in particular on the Clyde, where massive man-power and resources went into the construction of some of the biggest engineering structures the world has ever seen. Muirhead Bone (1876–1953) recorded Glasgow’s late-nineteenth-century expansion and its continuing activity during the 1914–18 war. The etchings ‘Cranes: Start of a New Ship’ (1917) and ‘A Shipyard Scene from a Big Crane’, of the same year, are typical examples of Bone’s work at this time. They show the energy and activity of a working shipyard where the workers are dwarfed by the sheer size of the structures they are toiling to complete.
Other artists, too, have worked in this tradition. Around the time Bone was working in Glasgow as a war artist, John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961) spent six weeks in 1918 painting in Portsmouth Docks. Earlier still, William Bell Scott (1811–1890) had depicted industrial Britain in such works as ‘Iron and Coal’ (1861), popular in part because of the relative rarity of its subject matter.
It should also be remembered that one of the most talented painters to have emerged from Scotland in the past twenty years, Steven Campbell, was employed as a steel-works maintenance engineer for seven years prior to entering Glasgow School of Art. Like Stanley Spencer before him, Campbell invests the imagery of the shipyard with religious and spiritual metaphor. Other Scottish-based artists, in particular Kate Downie, have delighted in depicting with verve and passion the glories of Scotland’s engineering.
But it is perhaps to the English painter Stanley Spencer rather than to Bone that we should look in establishing a precedent for Taylor’s vision. Spencer was assigned the task of recording the life and work of the Lithgow shipyards at Port Glasgow during the Second World War and his work as an official war artist was the subject of a major exhibition in Glasgow in 1994 and another in Edinburgh in 1999. Spencer made himself a part of this world; his work identifies with the working men and women he represents in his stylised but oddly realist images. Spencer as an educated middle-class, diminutive southern English intellectual made himself at home and was accepted and admired in an environment diametrically opposed to his own: so too did Taylor, as a young woman, in a threatening, at times hostile and frightening male environment make herself at home, and also ultimately found acceptance.
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There was, perhaps, an inevitability to Taylor’s decision to depict the life and images on the various oil-related installations she visited during the 1980s, due in part to growing up on the Black Isle, a part of Scotland greatly affected, both physically and economically, by the developing oil industry. For a young, visually aware person growing up in such an environment, the effect of the physical changes and interventions on the landscape must have been enormous. One can imagine in Taylor an admixture of fascination and trepidation, gazing at the vast male-built, man-inhabited world represented by the colossal structures of the oil industry. Taylor admits, too, a kind of quasi-eroticism in her attraction to this world of men, machinery, steel and flame.
Taylor trained at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen and followed this with post-graduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Gray’s was a natural choice for a young, gifted artist from the Highlands of Scotland. At Gray’s she was taught design by Fred Stiven, Anslie Yule, drawing by Frances Walker, painting by Joyce Cairns and, later, printmaking by Gordon Bryce. This was a liberal curriculum allowing breadth, depth and scope for personal experimentation. It is difficult to exaggerate the effect of such training on a young artist; these teachers were part of a continuing tradition in Scottish art where the crafts of drawing and painting were allied strongly to observational and compositional skills. It is no exaggeration to state that in Scotland, the links between this kind of approach and the world of mathematics (in particular geometry), architecture, design and engineering were exceptionally strong. From these teachers Taylor learned important basic skills: she cites the ‘golden mean’ and the fundamentals underlying the practice of modern masters such as Le Corbusier, as being highly significant. An understanding of these principles involved in design and engineering is fundamental to Taylor’s ability to render them convincing in print and drawing. She has stated that the craft of drawing and representation is central to her approach. Her awareness is obvious when considering not only her depictions of man-made structures but also, importantly, the human form.
When Taylor moved, at the age of twenty-two, to study for a post-graduate diploma at the Slade she recalls a vibrant cosmopolitan atmosphere with an exciting city to explore. At the Slade, Taylor studied printmaking under Bartolomeu Dos Santos, a powerful personality and an inspiring teacher. Significantly, Taylor recalls Sir Eduardo Paolozzi in his capacity not as a teacher but as external assessor: ‘I will never forget his amazing, big sculptural hands – just like his own sculptures – and his huge, solid, strong head resting on this massive strong body.’1
As Taylor became more involved in the subject of the oil-worker she wanted to look into how other visual artists portrayed the theme of the worker, particularly in more recent art history. Courbet, Millet and Gauguin were obvious artists to look at, as their work ranged from romantic subjects, such as peasants in the fields, to a brutal and much starker reality. Perhaps rather more surprisingly the inter-war German artist, Kathe Kollwitz provided an influence not only through her ‘powerful portrait studies but also her agility and natural ability to transfer these skills to etching and lithography. And her observation of the marked, scarred faces of the toils of poverty and working life at that time.’2
Taylor also cites the eighteenth-century Italian printmaker, Giambattista Piranesi, as a powerful model, in particular, ‘his incredible, fantastical images of imaginary prisons . . . creating such powerful towering structures in the form of the etched line’.3
The list of influences on Taylor is as broad as it is deep. Another is Joan Eardley who, like Taylor, worked for part of her career on Clydeside but moved to more peaceful conditions in the north of Scotland. Eardley was transfixed by the influence of the sea and her habit of working en plein air obviously appeals to Taylor.
Another influence is Glasgow artist Ken Currie, notably for his work ‘The Glasgow History Mural’, commissioned by the People’s Palace Museum, Glasgow in 1987: eight large-scale painted panels commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Carlton Weaver Massacre. ‘Conviction and passion shine through in these works and breathe new life into an old tradition.’4
Taylor also admires Turner for his ‘free style of painting watercolour from the open air, expressive and experimental for his time. His method and way of recording and experiencing the natural elements . . . such as strapping himself to a mast in extreme rough weather out at sea.’5
As a student at the Slade, Taylor became fascinated by the concept of ‘The Northern Landscape’. In 1984 she was awarded the Swedish Institute one-year scholarship to study at the Konsthogskolan in Stockholm. Edvard Munch in particular had a deep influence and there is a clear thematic association with Taylor’s work, as was demonstrated in a touring exhibition ‘Munch and the Workers’, which was shown at The City Art Centre in Edinburgh in 1985 and included not only depictions of agricultural and agrarian labour but workers in an urban setting undertaking constructional labour.6
In all of these cases, and in Taylor’s, there is an important dimension: that of empathy with the worker and identification with him, as if he and the artist were involved in some communal project linked by work.
1 Taylor, S.J, Letter to Giles Sutherland, 26 September 2002
2 ibid.
3 ibid.
4 ‘Vigorous Imagination’ exhibition catalogue, National Galleries of Scotland 1987
5 Taylor, S.J, Letter to Giles Sutherland, 26 September 2002
6 Taylor’s touring exhibition ‘Oil Worker Scotland’ was itself shown here in 1989
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The body of work contained within the time period under discussion (1984–94) is large by any standards, amounting to over 400 photographs, drawings, prints, paintings and sculptures. I have outlined above the context of the work and will now consider in detail a few images, linking them to a general theme.
‘The Oil Man and the Stag’ (1989)
This etching, completed in 1989, represents the Scottish oil industry in allegorical as well as literal terms. The image of a sardonic worker in blue hard hat and spotted kerchief is juxtaposed with the head and antlers of the stag. To one side is a dark windblown tree. The work relates to a number of others completed at this time, including ‘Crann Dubh’ (Black Tree), which shows a woman and a man in proximity to another lone, dark outlined skeletal tree.
The motif of the stag (well known from the kitsch of Landseer to the politicised, socialist polemic of McGrath) might symbolise Scotland but, as with the tree, it stands for the much more general and fragile concept of nature, pitted against humanity’s need for work, wealth, fuel and profit; here old and new, industrial and organic, clash in a seemingly intractable opposition. As well as invoking such powerful symbolism and all its attendant allusions, Taylor pictures her worker as identifiable, with a face. This is her habitual approach and suggests empathy, understanding and her compassionate need to represent the ‘human face’ of technological progress.
’Rigger 1’ (1987)
This etching, dating from 1987, is more iconic and thus more generic than ‘The Oil Man and the Stag’ and is a deceptively simple yet arresting image. It shows the head and upper torso of a rigger clad in a hooded red protective suit. Although identifiable, the noble face with its straight nose and thick moustache recalls Romantic imagery of the warrior or adventurer.
As if to emphasise the nobility of this warrior pose, the harness attachments on the rigger’s survival suit are deliberately blurred, assuming the role of ornamental buckles or even brooches on the plaids of medieval Scottish Highland chiefs. Although the colour scheme here is simple – red and black – the way in which it has been employed shows not only an assured compositional sense, but also the effect of colour on the senses. For here, the red of the survival suit is allowed to ‘bleed’ beyond the confines of the etched outline of the figure, expressively suggesting movement and emotion.
This study relates directly to Taylor’s fascination with Munch who used colour in a similarly symbolic way, in particular in his series of ‘jealousy’ paintings.
Studies For ‘Kromer Hat’ (1993)
Taylor first visited John Brown’s shipyard (now UIE) on Clydebank in September 1987. Although the old cloth ‘bunnets’ so vividly and memorably depicted by Stanley Spencer have long since vanished, ousted by health and safety regulations, and been replaced by the hard hat, the humour and individuality – the humanity – of these men is asserted in the form of differently coloured hats for different trades. The Kromer Hat came over from Milwaukee, primarily as a safety item. However, as well as the safety aspects, they come in a variety of patterns and colours. This, coupled with the colourful array of bandanas, inspired the title of Taylor’s 1993 project which culminated in the unveiling of the ‘Kromer Hat’ worker’s head ‘presented to the people of Clydebank’. Although the head was modelled on Roy Callaghan, one of the welders, there is as well as this distinctive acknowledgment of humanity, a dedication to all workers from this industry, and beyond.
Such complexity underpins Taylor’s approach and typifies her bold and uncompromising stance, born of understanding, empathy, craft and a highly defined artistry.
Giles Sutherland - Edinburgh 2005