I arrived in Europe in September 1963 at Naples on the Kenya Castle. I’d danced the Twist in Crater, Aden and dolled myself up as Tutenkamun for the fancy dress, but nothing caused the thrill I got when I arrived at Pompeii by rail and was driven to the ruins by Mario in his open carriage. I sat up front with him. Then the plaster casts, the red walls and the murals of the Villa of Mysteries, then the tiny bronze cast I bought of a satyr finning and pouring wine from a goatskin into a goblet. Finally, there was the Houses of boys, where in whitewashed rooms the custodian carefully unlocked the plain, wooden cupboards that were dotted around the walls to reveal ( and then rapidly conceal) huge tumescent winged membri virili!
I started painting scenery first. At Selbourne College. My Madame Dulcie duVogue fashion show to raise Rugby funds and then at Rhodes where I was taught by that great master Sweeny Todd, and did the sets and costumes with him for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “Hamlet”, “Othello”, Gilbert & Sulliven musicals and my ovn productions of “The Rivals” and “Waiting For Godot” when I became Chairman of he Drama Society. But it was Natalie Guiton who permitted me to create the Fall of Icarus in the Design Room. It was my first “real” mural, which actually lead to my first commission which was to cover the Women’s Dining Hall with a congo mural using the first ever emulsion paint and tinters.
Why Congo? Well, together with the wonderful jeweller Nikos Spururos Frantzis I hitch hiked all the way from Cape Town to Salisbury and then to Kindu which was half way up Africa in what was then the Belgian Congo. Vivid Francophone impressions. And greek subtexts and words. Nikos was visiting his guardian Manoli and his father from Samos had been Greek. On my return I drew directly onto the plaster using charcoal, and then using twine and glue I carefully followed every contour. The idea being that the light from the windows on the left woudl strike the raised string and give and enamel-like effect. If did.
After a spell in radio, I went to Northern Rhodesia where I did lots of local drama festival set-designing before working in Bedford in 1962 as a drama teacher for a single term. It was in Italy in April 1963 that I held my first ever exhibition of oil paintings and absorbed the incredible possibilities of wall decoration when I visited Monreale, the Byzantine church just outside Palermo. The Capella Reale of the French King Roger III and of course in Rome where I spent a week before flying back to Harare to be in sole charge of all sets, illustrations and captions for 3000 films recorded on videotape for Schools Television. It was using the old vidicon TV camereas which split all images into five grey shades that I learnt to paint for the camera. It’s a habit I haven’t shaken and all my work looks wonderful on camera.
Domestic
— Audrey’s Chimney Breast
Bathroom Shrine
My client Christopher – who commissioned “I Dream of You” became so infatuated with the photo of Bob shown here that it occupied a place just inside his front door in Muswell Hill. I think that it was given the status of a Holy Icon!
In the original photo, I used makeup to draw cubist lines around one pectoral and also around one of Bob’s eyes. The Yogic backbender is a memory quote of the teen David who was given to assuming postures such as this.
Behind him is a photograph of the front of Alexandra Palace which is near Muswell Hill. The scallop shells are some of those used for the ceiling “Danger in Near Perfect Weather”, pilgrim badges on the way to Compostella in Spain.
I hope this piece was removed to Brighton when Christopher did. It originally hung above the backroom door and witnessed candlelit bathroom rites!
Butterfly Bedroom
The planning for this piece took weeks as I had already completed a triangular piece in faux stone for the conservatory and the amibitious “Nine Muses Hallway”.The room used for house-guests is large and at its highest point is nine feet from floor to apex and is thirteen feet wide.
I wanted to celebrate being on the cusp between boyhood and manhood, a tragic brevity, and hit upon the butterfly as the most suitable image – it is part of scottish witchcraft folklore and symbolises dead spirits. The main decorative scheme is a gothic screen which spans the entire width of the room and behind which one catches glimpses of the forest and lake. The Butterfly spreads its wings at the apex circled by spheres representing the nine muses whom I had invoked in my murals in the hallway downstairs.
John prepared the wall using whitegold oil paint which gives a mystic sheen to the whole work. Below the butterfly is a cloth worth by my friend and life model Chris on which I have written, LEARN, LOVE, WORK MAGIC. Through the grey screen one looks towards a future I shall not see; the mystic mountain leading from the LOWER to the HIGHER KNOWLEDGE ,and the moon in conjunction with the sun.
Chartreusse Summerskill
I spent all my holidays in a small highland village in France. Having answered an advertisement found in a copy of PARIS PASSION the English-American Ex-Pat Guide, I did my first work of restoration and distressed decoration at the Chateau Vrillaye in Richlieu. Everything from repairing gilded picture frames to painting faux marble fireplaces. The huge international workforce transformed the Chateau and its gardens into a hotel. While there, we drank lots of wine and performed grotesque masques to baroque music the narration being my invention extempore. Two of the workers Darren and Murray later moved to another project and phoned me in Scotland to ask if I’d wave my magic brush over the Chartreuse of Baroness Summerskill-Bronte. I readily agreed and spent Easter and summer there working to completely decorate the interior but to the strict taste of la Summerskill.
She taught me wonderful tricks of making new work ‘vanish’ and become invisible – as if the decor had been there for hundreds of years. I painted murals up the entire staircase, later removed and replaced by painted eighteenth centry wallpaper (all created by me when I wasn’t drinking Blanquette di Limoux and eating clafoutie). I spent thirteen hours doing a ten colour stencil in the kitchen and a vast five colour stencil in the bedroom.
I wrote a text which Colin translated into French to put at the top of the stairs: ”We all seem to wait for Nothing to come, and when Nothing comes, we cry for we want somuch more, we want so much more, than waiting so calmly to Die; Fly bird fly, fly far and wide for many a sun will rise and fall before my tale is told…”. This of course shows the influence of waiting for Godot, the first act of which I designed and directed in 1957/8.
Later work at The Manoir de Beausejour near Brive was even more elaborate as was the work I did at the Domain de Perenard in Bergerac where I did a painting I later used in the mural called “The Great Forest” for John McNulty in Minard, Argyll.
Chinese Hallway
A doctor who works in the Gulf States and his wife have, what was, the schoolhouse at Kilmichael. As the lady of the house is a qualified midwife and accupuncturist she commissioned a mural for her hallway incorporating all her knowledge of Chinese medicine. I researched the subject in Soho, while I was painting the mural called “I Dream of You”.
The mural was to contain lots of opposites; black/white, male/female, Loon/Fook, Dragon/Phoenix and of course the five elements. I started with a panel far right and showed two hands reaching down from the ceiling to hold a newborn babe with a baroque umbilical cord. The background was textured watered celedon-green silk.
I split the main wall and painted half black and half white, and then using fine masking tape I lined these walls vertically before overpainting each in the opposite colour. Right along the top of the entire wall I painted the I-Ching Changes in black on silver and made black shark fins which project from the wall, from the tips of which hang tasseled golden bells. In the centre of the main wall I created a five sided geometric plane and wrote the symbols for each of the five elements, in the centre of which was painted the Yin/Yang symbol using holographic film with four traditional dragon beasts in relief. Below the mural I painted a bamboo-panel dado.
I had intended to tape the stripped pine floor of the hallway and paint diagonal black stripes but never got round to it. Please do not laugh or pity me, but my fee for this elaborate masterpiece was a mere £45!
Domaine de aton de Bergerac
Great Forest McNulty
This mural is a vast work painted on strips of vinyl wallpaper sideways and assembled and hung in situ by a master wallperer.
The piece measures thirty feet by thirteen feet and is pierced by numerous doors etc. Behind the hi-fi I painted a family of rabbits for the young son, on the right over the staircase is a blasted oak in which a sly fox pauses. The entire forest has gold and white gold highlights which can be best seen at nigh. Because of the size and complexity of the mural, it is very difficult to photograph and the photograph here shows only a minor section.
I Dream of You
I had stayed with Chris while I created the wise monkey candlesticks for the banquet fantasia I had conceived in which each course presented to a gatherings dressed in ‘smokings’ would be a suitably decorated ‘dish’ in the shape of an immobile youth on a silver platter! The six candlesticks were removed by a famous designer and never fired and merely allowed to fall to pieces! Chris however liked my imagination and dressed in nothing but his Calvins and workboots would set of to podium dance with Cocteauesque faces using his nipples as eyes painted on his chest.
He wanted a mural or ‘Murial’ as he called it, and flew me to London for ten days to create it. I used his volumes of journal (he was the editor of a Brent newspaper) to select choice phrases, and photocopied strips of his writing which were then shuffled and arranged into the poem-text known as “I Dream of You” – the piece can be found elsewhere on this site.
Chris had had six lovers, and wanted them to figure in his mural. I chose the overmantel in his bedroom as the most suitable space and glued the strips of text in a radiating starburst from the centre; which was not unlike a huge capsule in which could be seen lakeland (like that of where he was born) and his face wearing mirrorglasses and two central men kissing. Below them Chris as Cupidon – wings outspread and seen from behind. To left and right around the fireplace opening, photocopied figures by the photographer ASHLEY can be seen featuring snakes and toads against a deep scarlet background.
During the ten days it took me to paint the mural I played Chris’s collection of cassette tapes of music from his schooldays to the present. I also made a videotape; a bathroom piece with shells and attended a wonderful party. After two weeks in Spain in late April Chris moved to Brighton where he now lives. One can only assume that the mural has been painted over! A pity.
Nine Muses Hallway
This was my second commision for the remarkable couple, John and Ann Holt.
John is a fluent french speaker and as such the mural seemed to warrent a subtle method of alluding to the specific attributes of each of the nine muses of classical mythology. My first act was to therefore take a collection of french texts and their translations published by the BBC and photocopied verses which most nearly fitted each muse.
In place of the non-existent tenth muse (for painting and sculpture), I chose the brother of one of the muses known as Crotus, an archer and half-horse. I had already transformed photographs of Bob into a man-horse that was not a centaur (having four human legs) and had created a sculpture called AneMale.
One enters the hallway from the garden and can look the length of the room which is fairly narrow. To the right is an arched doorway/cupboad which provided the measurement for the roundel I painted on the first landing showing Crotus shooting an arrow over his left shoulder. This flight of arrows circles entire hallway linking each of the nine panels. The horse’s bottom is inspired by my large collage called The Red Thong! I bonded each of the ten texts to the walls using PVC, thus making them virtually invisible, and then working clockwise starting with the History muse, moved slowly round the area working nine to five daily.
During this time I indulged in spirited discussion with Ann about all matters artistic and of the danger of ‘overcooking ones cabbage’; which of course I promptly did when in a moment of madness I thought I’d veil the entire piece in transparent fluffy clouds. Unfortunately, the clouds dried opaque, consquently obliterating all the work I’d done! It required a great deal of courage to start all over again.
Yacht Aeolus
The owner of the Lochgilphead Cyber Cafe has a yacht and requested that I decorate the stern rudderboard with the name Aeolus and a device.
I eschewed faffaced faces blowing winds and chose instead to do a baroque cartouche and compass rose with a flock of naked putti instead.
Commercial
Ayr Academy
The 750th anniversary applique hanging (one of the three planned). The piece was sewn together by Susan but cut, pinned, measured, designed, costed and ordered by me I while assistant art teacher at the Academy, 1980-87.
The felt hanging shows three cubes, blocks of time each 250 years long during which the Academy had been in operation. The hall built in the 1900s had grey and deep red tiles around it. The colours of the thirty foot by thirty foot curtain were chosen to match them.
There are representations of famous Ayr bridges on the padded silver lame diagonal square. All the work involved was unpaid and done at home in addition to my normal teaching duties.
Ayr Ice Rink
Eight huge diamond shaped landscapes in the main rink, entrancehall and restaurant. Upstairs in the bar there is a mural about curling. The main rink is the biggest mural I ever painted being one hundred and twenty feet long by twenty feet high and fills the entire wall on the left of the smaller of the two rinks. The basis for this was Winter Sports.
I was paid £120 for two weeks work and took my first holiday(a week)from being a single parent in Grand Canaria at Los Turbitos.
Danger in Near Perfect Weather
This piece is a 10ftx10ft ceiling completed in computer designed self-adhesive plastic thatwas to be installed over the hairwashing stations. An eight foot surfboard sculpture of merman incorporating a round mirror was also completed.
Shortly before I was commissioned to create the decor for the salon, I had met a native of Barra called Donald who mesmerised me with his unique accent. At the same time, the newspapers announced that four trawlers having set out from a west coast Scottish port had all sunk without reason, and all filled with teenage boys. These reports had a profound effect on me and I composed the text using the newspaper headline (” Danger in Near Perfect Weather” ) as the title.
To the above, I incorporated many fatalistic Sufi sayings and used four photographs I had taken of Daniel to symbolise the lives lost on the trawlers. The owner of the salon gave me a photograph of herself which was transformed into the character of Breaker. This character can be seen circling the central head of a young man whom I paid fifteen pounds because his hairstyle was just what I needed; I believe he later went onto University to read mathematics.
I have a t-shirt with the design on it, and a framed print of the design, but as far as I know the ceiling P1000 was never printed or installed…a great, great tragedy inspired by an even greater one.
Dansarena
The fifty individual murals for this building were painted by me using acrylic emulsion.
The principal mural at least seventy feet wide by fifteen feet high shows the closed curtain of the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden against which the most famous dancers of the last century have taken their bows. There is a step that runs the entire width of the mural and it is on this that the young trainee dancers sit and chat between classes, and can read the names and dates of the dancers shown.
There is also a large roundel in the entrance hall of a dancer en pointe. In the cafe, there is an enormous half circular mural of French musichall dancer Loie Fuller. Upstairs where the practice mirrors are, the entire end wall has murals of famous Scottish dancers. The final murals are in the rehearsal hall at the back of the building.
Once I had finished this project, there was a feature published on the murals in “Scottish Life” Magazine.
Grundy
Before the company which makes “Neighbours” purchased the large Victorian house in Kensington for £5.1 million, I was flown to London to give the cream-painted shell character. Leading back from the first floor reception room was a library, shelved, but without books which in turn led to a lofty cubic anteroom with a fireplace, fine double floor to ceiling doors which then opened to reveal the astonishing octagonal conservatory, the lantern windows of which reached upward from the paneled walls some fifteen feet above the parquet floor.
For the agreed payment of £1,000 I undertook to cover the walls of the cubic antechamber in tromp l’oeil silk damask brocade based on the wrought-iron balustrade ,and then to decorate the conservatory on two levels with large faux-marble swags of classical fruit (the colours derived from the marble fireplace); four swags near the lantern windows and four swags on the panels at floor level. I also suggested that the library shelves be filled with books bought by the shelf-full and covered in paper slip covers such as I had seen in The Citizens production of Don Juan.
This was done by a student hired for the purpose. I used taxis to buy the paint and ordered the floorcloths and trestles and planks as I had been instructed to do. I then worked alone and utterly unaided and uninsured over the Easter Holiday weekend for four days and completed the work as agreed.
The cube-room was done with stencils I cut dabbing first eggshell cream emulsion on a base of light cream emulsion,then a second stencil using gloss cream emulsion was stenciled over that; finally a stencil using white gold water based emulsion completed the effect. The site inspector was not best pleased! I had left a space as wide as a video cassette between the ‘damask’ and the immaculate wainscot intending someone to edge it with gimp of a suitable colour.
The conservatory was next given the once over. Why didn’t you paint SIXTEEN SWAGS? One on each of the upper and lower panels? I explained my terror at having to balance on two sagging unplaned scaffold planks between the metal supports resting as they were on slippery parquet and having to crawl up and down the uprights to change and mix each of the five colours I had used. The floorcloth was next scuffed with a shoetoe…y ou were not authorised to buy this… and the scaffolding is dangerous, “You might have been killed!”
I showed the order slip for the scaffold exactly as written in his handwriting; this was brushed aside with annoyance, “The materials WILL HAVE TO BE DEDUCTED from your fee!” I was exhausted and beyond misery.
My return plane was to leave at three the next afternoon; at two I was collected and bought lunch, I ran for a taxi to take me to Heathrow clutching my ‘salary’ in an envelope. In cash. When opened it revealed £400; a bitter lesson learnt. And i have not a single promised photograph of my work to show for my efforts. When I repeatedly requested photographs I was told that my work had been regarded as ‘CONTROVERSIAL’ nevertheless, on the strength of it, the conservatory decked out with potted palms and the cubic room sold the house to Grundy a few days later. My hopes of a London mural painting career ended.
Hotel Vittorio
While I was in Reggio Calabria I had a break during the Easter holiday. Instead of waiting until September when I was to do the mural I had been commissioned to do, I was bundled into a Ford Ka and driven at criminal speed via Messina, Taormina, Acireale, Catania and onto to Porto Palo in the Southernmost point of eastern Sicil. We arrived there three hours later, just as the sun was setting.
At the meal that night there was no question at all that I was going to paint my planned mural of three sea gods researched at the museum of Magna Graecia. The client wanted the mural to be in the dining room wall, a space some thirty feet wide. I slept fitfully and thought of the story I’d been told during dinner about the young fisherman Vittorio who had drowned (an eerie echo of my text for “Danger In Near Perfect Weather” ) and it seemed then, quite obvious that I should paint a mural of the surrounding town based on the letters of the name Vittorio but concealing it subtly until pointed out.
I worked from 7am to Tpm daily for three days and was proudly shown the local farms; the produce of which I included in the mural. As the table cloths were going to be red, I decided that the mural would be in cool shades of blue and no other colour. However, I later relented and added sparce blocks of a gold metallic colour. When viewed, one can see the Easter procession I saw while there, the boats, the island of currents, the lighthouse etc.
During the painting, I also met the boy Corrado who said on seeing the finished work, ‘Che bella murale!’. He later became the subject of the painting I later did called “Corrado Turning Cartwheels”. My payment was two weeks fullboard at the hotel from 14th to 30th September, not cash.
Lochgilphead Cyber Cafe
I chose all the colours for this project based on suntanned flesh and warm turquoise tropical seas.
The inner room housing four computers for surfing the Internet was painted the darkest possible fir-green with same colours mechanical details added.
On the emergency exit door I painted a unisex surfer in a silverbodysuit on a surfboard holding an electronic mouse aloft in the left hand.
All this work has been utterly destroyed. The cybercafe which lost money is now an Italian Restaurant.
Myknos Bar
Stables Gallery
Gabi and her kindly retired husband bought a disused outhouse in the centre of the village opposite the George Hotel and transformed it themselves into The Stable Gallery. The gallery was so named because Clydesdale horses used in former times to move cargo from the port had been kept there.
I was commissioned by Gabi to create a mural, but was insistant that what was needed was a faux standingstone on which pre-historic Dalriada rockcarvings could be simulated. This was to have been fixed to a beam at secondfloor height. Gabi would have none of it and demanded a painted mural. I chose the roughstone gable end on the secondfloor and asked that it be framed and filled with a ceiling board screen on which to put the mural. This was done and I looked through my family album to find photographs of my great Grandfather James Laing – a farmer and ploughman from Aberdeenshire. I found one sepia photograph that was perfect. James, soft receptacle in hand feeding oats to a Clydesdale. I painted this onto strips of vinyl wallpaper, together with the details of the ships and the carts pulled by the animals.
In the last stages of the work Gabi requested that I included her mother into the mural… and there she is… seated left foreground. The colour of the mural is bronzed sepia at the top and gradually becomes a light and colour-filled homage to the pastels of Degas.
Stonewall Cafe
I had known the generous lan Dunn for a decade or more when he invited me to design the decor for his Sonewall Cafe in Broughton Street, Edinburgh.
When he bought the large townhouse which would finally be instrumental in killing him through financial worrries, I had advised him on room colours and in the commission he gave to Robbie Hayes for a huge painting of the Taurus star sign which dominated one of the walls of the living room. My work on this venture, though, was greatly inspired by the iconic scene in the Lost Boys in which Corey Haim sings “I’m a Lonely Boy”, while in a bathtub guarded by his Dog. I decided that what lan’s garden needed was a sculpture in cement of the top half and knees of a man in a real bathtub buried to the rim in the back garden. From the groin of the sculpture a fountain would jet skywards! The neighbours complained; so I revised the scheme to create a fountain built into one of the garden walls, and the sculpture I had created over a chickenwire core was left for the Edinburgh frosts to destroy.
Thinking he’d be able to pay for his townhouse by opening a business, lan took on the lease of the cafe behind the GLC in Broughton Street and named it the Stonewall Cafe, after the Greenwich Village cafe of the same name which had poineered the entire the Gay Rights movement. I drew up designs. Having just completed the YINNANG murals at the Kilmartin Schoolhouse, I decided on severe ceiling to floor broadstriped black and white curtains.
Further inspired by the “Danger in Near Perfect Weather” ceiling, I decided that a ceiling with the theme ‘We Are One’ would be apropriate. Over the fireplace I decided to paint a huge head illustrating the Dylan Thomas line about “the Force that through the green fuse drives” or the traditional Green Man – bringer of bounty and Lord of Nature.
I cannot underestimate monumental work involved in this task. Having scrupulously measured the floorspace I used a disused old library building and stretched rolls of vinyl wallpaper over it connected with masking tape. I drew a circle fifteen foot radius which I divided into six segments. Each of these sections was given it’ s own colour – the three primary colours (red, yellow and blue), and the others the three secondary colours (green, orange and purple).
Using my obsession BOB as my muse I created and painted six ‘Angels’, each of which exemplified a typical GLBT stereotype and were inserted into each of the coloured sections.
The purple angel was a Dietrich lesbian who sewed (a reference to the lesbian Hollywood actresses known as ‘the sewing circle. The other three female angels were a vast opera singer and the last was a monocle-wearing, one legged butch dyke. The three male angels were a leather SM niple-pierced angel, a thai ladyboy, and finally an amazing disco podium dancer angel. I included all twelve zodiac signs and corresponding black and white stripes in the background. The entire painting was then reduced to individual rolls of wallpaper which were installed and pasted to the high Victorian ceiling and lit by uplighters. The Green man overmantel, was later painted and pasted in the same way.
I arrived for the opening ceremony wearing my ponytail hair and an eighteenth century coat with another angel on the back of it. The entire ceremony was videotaped, photographed and blessed by The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Unfortunately, the strain of all this brought on the heart-attack which killed lan, after which the entire cafe was gutted and sold.
I never finished the fountain in the garden of the townhouse, but wrote the poem “Fountain” and created the collage of the man spitting a jet of water (” Shaking Down This House” ). I later collaborated with Tony Higgins to make the unique “Bathduck Boy”, based on the idea for the garden.
I had always loved visiting Edinburgh, but Robbie Hayes the great graphic designer took his own life – while his friends downstairs ate the final meal he had cooked for them – and lan’s death, the city was never the same for me again. There was no short way to explain the effort that went into the all of the projects described here… all of them. ultimately came to nothing.
However, it truly was an exciting and spirited time.
The Attic Stained Glass Windows
Wudil Library
Fifteen miles south of the ancient mud buildings of Kano in Northern Nigeria is the Wudil Teacher Training College. Every week there was a huge market at which vast shells of calabashes some a metre wide were sold. These were decorated with exquisite burnt decorations done with hot wire, the edges of knives or branding irons. The master decorator and I with the help of a translator undertook to cover the entire outer surface of the bland shed-like library building with painted decorations based on his traditional calabash motifs. He had never used paint before.
He was so proud,and of course being abstract the patterns were not offensive to the strict Sunni Islamic rules about representing LIVING things. I think the decoration was done in 1973, while the College students were away on holiday.
Stewart Laing 