On the pleasures of ownership

Climbing the staircase to the very top of his 19th century townhouse in the middle of Geneva, Jean Bonna itemises each magnificent work of art as he shuffles past, pausing a couple of times to gesture and offer an observation.

“Here you have some of the Italians,” he says languidly. “Castiglione … another Tiepolo. Those are three of the Durer prints of the unicorn. This is the Whore of Babylon” At the top of the staircase he pauses, and then heads off into an airy room. “Now this Courbet, it really is absolutely exceptional. And the Delacroix and the Gericault… “

The list goes on and on, through all three floors of his house. This Friday, the most spectacular of this endless parade of drawings will find their way into an Edinburgh exhibition: Raphael to Renoir: Master Drawings from the collection of Jean Bonna. It is, as they say, unmissable.

The show is the only European outing of a unique selection of artworks originally chosen by curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It will form the centrepiece of the National Gallery of Scotland’s festival exhibition schedule, an extraordinary display of works, which together capture, as Mr Bonna puts it, “the first thoughts” of the great artists. “Even when they are finished drawings,” he says, “they are more immediate than a painting, more spontaneous. There is movement, more life.”

Each of the Edinburgh works is taken from the walls of this rambling, very intimate house. From Raphael’s Study of Soldiers (which normally adorns the ground-floor sitting room) via Woman in a White Bonnet by George Seurat, and Odilon Redon’s vibrant pastel, La Barque, they hang in its bedrooms and parlours, the corridors and anterooms, arranged for their owner’s particular delight.

Mr Bonna, now retired, was the fifth generation of his family to enter the well-rewarded and very grown-up world of merchant banking, but he has been an incorrigible collector, since childhood. When he was 11, he was gifted a book written by the president of the Bouquinistes – or booksellers – of the Paris Quais, even then inscribed “to one of my good clients”.

Thus encouraged, for decades French Literature consumed him, until he had collected everything, “from the first literary work to the beginning of the 20th century”. Everything? It seems an astonishing claim. This dapper little man in his neat jacket, a striped shirt and braces, stops and considers for a moment. “I am missing maybe 15 major books.” he says thoughtfully.

But it was never just about literature for Mr Bonna. He has knitted together in his many different collections a personal world of high culture, in which his own good taste is arbiter.

There are autographs of most of those French authors, from A to Zola, filed away in a cabinet on the third floor of the house. The Durers on the staircase are symbols of what he modestly calls “the nucleus of a print collection”. He has an assortment of Louis XV and Louis XVI chairs and other antique furniture; an array of vintage photography; and what he describes as “a few bronzes and a few terracottas”. He loves music, though he protests that he doesn’t collect it. “I have a few things by Wagner I could show you,” he says, “but that is slightly besides the point.” Mr Bonna, in his mid-sixties, even collects ex-wives – there are two of those bumping around Switzerland.

Drawings by the great masters, however, have been the heart of his obsession for the best part of 25 years. He purchased his first in 1985, L’Aubergiste courtisee (The Courted Maid) by Hubert Robert, though it was three years before he bought again at Christie’s in New York.

Gradually he met dealers, curators and other collectors, becoming immersed in a whole new world of high culture, studying, learning and buying whenever he found something he liked and could afford. The 120 drawings he has loaned for the Edinburgh show represent slightly more than a third of his total collection, and the larger portion will remain on the walls of this house. He even employs two full-time curators.

There is a price on all this. Over these last two decades he has parted, he admits, with millions of dollars, including the [euros]650,000 he spent at auction on Parmigianino’s The Holy Family with Shepherds and Angels, a work he describes as “the most important Italian old master drawing, his best study for his finest painting”.

But playing this market is not just about wealth, he insists. “‘Means’, as they say in France, ‘is a condition which is necessary, but not sufficient,’” he says. “The first quality you require to build a collection of either books or drawings is passion. It you are not passionate you do not do it. Even when I was working, if I had a free hour, I would visit antique shops, a dealer, a museum, a curator. It consumed all my time, besides my profession and my family. It takes you over completely.”

Mr Bonna’s passion for art never ends. In a drawing collection, he says, each image has a different subject, and their number is almost limitless. Theoretically you could collect forever, though there are constraints.

“If you decide to make a collection, say, of French literature, you will inevitably buy an author which you don’t like. I am not particularly fond of Rousseau but I still have everything written by him, in first edition and in contemporary bindings, because he is very important in the history of ideas. But you could never buy a drawing you don’t like – or at least I cannot,” he says.

He has a some tips for anyone with a few spare shekels and time to cultivate the market. It is not wise to buy at auction too often, he advises, it only antagonises the dealers. Better to cultivate the dealers and curators, and keep track of the ownership of the finest drawings – this way you’ll know in advance when an opportunity to buy might arise.

And learn where to shop for bargains., he says Not at flea markets – “I never find things in flea markets” – but at booksellers who will occasionally buy whole libraries from dying collectors. Often there are drawings in among these books, and the dealers sometimes have little idea of their true worth. Occasionally, Mr Bonna has left a shop with an old master in a paper bag, worth many times its purchase price, and a satisfied smile on his lips.

From such efforts, great collections grow, and with them a warm sensation which he recognises as the pleasure of possession. “I wouldn’t say it made you feel good or even better. You simply feel different.”

Can he define the pleasure of passion more precisely? Mr Bonna has an anecdote to encapsulate exactly what he means. He recently spent a fascinating day at the Uffizi in Florence, poring over the drawing collections, and absorbing the wisdom of the curators. It was absolutely fascinating, he says.

“But ownership is another ingredient altogether,” he adds, suddenly animated. “To have a Raphael on your own wall – when you come home at night you can say: ‘This is mine!’”

* Raphael to Renoir: Master Drawings from the Collection of Jean Bonna, 5th June to 6th September. £4 (£3). National Galleries complex, the Mound, Edinburgh.

The online Vettriano

The Times, May 13, 2008

After falling out last year with the art dealer who helped to make him rich, Jack Vettriano, once dubbed “the people's painter”, has set up a website to sell his work.

Vettriano tells prospective buyers who visit his site that they will be able to find “images of paintings that are for sale in between exhibitions”. Unfortunately for those in the market for originals - which can sell for upwards of £300,000 - jackvettriano.com says that there are “currently no paintings available for purchase”.

Vettriano's artworks - originals and reproductions - have proved very popular, with galleries and art shops ringing with his sales for the better part of two decades. In 1993 he established a lucrative relationship with Tom Hewlett, an art dealer at the Portland Gallery in London. He profited from the sales of canvases but he made his fortune from the rights to his works, which have been used around the world on postcards, posters and gifts.

After a long period of creative inactivity, the partnership with the gallery was dissolved in July last year, amid rumours that he had failed to produce pictures for a promised exhibition.

To scotch that tittle-tattle, the artist's website features several unseen works. One of these, Blades, was apparently painted recently and, according to the site, is “part of series of paintings on a French Riviera theme” that Vettriano is working on.

“When Jack next has an exhibition, the images in his next show, wherever that might be, will be displayed,” said Isabelle Delacroix, who is helping the painter with his business. “In principle, if the paintings haven't been pre-placed with private collectors and they are available, there will certainly be an image and details on the site.”

Mr Hewlett is not involved in the website, and was unaware that it had gone “live”.

Other unseen works in the virtual gallery include Showgirl, which Vettriano painted in 1997, and the artwork for a CD cover, produced by the band Saint Jude's Infirmary, who recorded a song Goodbye Jack Vettriano.

Though none of these works is for sale, potential buyers can bid for Olympia, his recently completed portrait of Zara Phillips, which was commissioned for the charity Sport Relief. Olympia will be sold, along with works by Peter Blake, Gerald Scarfe and Stella Vine, at a fundraising auction in London this year.

Born Jack Hoggan, in St Andrews, Vettriano was brought up in Methil and began his career as a mining engineer, and he took up art in his spare time after being given a paint box by a girlfriend. He later adopted the name Vettriano from his mother's family, because he thought that it sounded more fitting for an artist. For admirers, his curious and often uncomfortable narrative scenes of human life have attracted comparison with the American figurative painter Edward Hopper.

In 2003 Vettriano was made an OBE for services to the visual arts and he has an honorary doctorate from St Andrews University. His celebrity buyers include Jack Nicholson, SirAlex Ferguson, Robbie Williams and Raymond Blanc.

Others remained unimpressed. In 2005 critics seized on the revelation that characters in some of Vettriano's best-known pictures appeared to have been copied from a teach-yourself painting manual. And neither Tate Gallery nor the National Galleries of Scotland has ever bought his work, with only one public collection in the UK displaying his paintings - and even those were a gift by the artist to his local gallery in Kirkcaldy.

Friends of Vettriano say that he is hurt by this lack of “official” recognition, but in a statement yesterday the painter said that he remained aloof from the argument. “I'm often dragged into the debate about whether or not my work should be shown in public collections, and while I feel that this is for others to decide I'm delighted that fans of my paintings will now be able to see a body of work of which I'm very proud. I've had some very flattering approaches but I've no plans to join another gallery just yet,” he said.

Even Vettriano's worst enemies acknowledge his unfailing instinct for publicity. In 2004 ITV's flagship arts programme, The South Bank Show, profiled him in a documentary entitled The People's Painter. Within a month The Singing Butler, his best-known work, which was owned by one of his friends, was sold at auction for £750,000, a record price for a living Scottish artist.

Waving not drowning, at last

The Times, 13 May 2008


In the living room of his Ayrshire home – with its panoramic view over the estuary to Cumbrae – James Watt sits surrounded by some of the paintings which have established him as Scotland’s finest maritime artist.

For decades he has captured the hubbub of life along the Clyde. Admirers of his russet-coloured harbours and dark tugs and trawlers compare him to the French Impressionists; the Queen collects his work; and tomorrow, the Royal Glasgow Institute will celebrate his career.

But recognition has not always come so easily. Setting out to paint in the austerity of the 1950s, Watt simply could not sell, and he vividly recalls how in a fit of anguish he destroyed some of his finest early works. He had, he says, made an appointment at a famous shipyard, confident of persuading its owner to invest. As he prepared to meet his new patron, Watt laid his pictures proudly round the walls of the boardroom.

“This man walked slowly round them. Then he called me to the window looking over the yard and said, ‘I’ve been staring at this every day of my working life. The last thing I want is to take any of it home with me.’ He didn’t buy a thing. I took all the paintings home and burnt them. I regret that now,” says Watt evenly.

Only two paintings in his living-room gallery are not his own, a white flower, gifted to Nancy, his wife, and a self-portrait of a woman in a soldier’s bonnet. Both unmistakeably are in the hand of his daughter Alison, whose exhibition, Phantom, has just opened at the National Gallery in London.

Their work seems light years apart – Alison’s stylised paintings are often full of eroticism – but the very difference in their outlook is a matter of pride to her father. For 38 years Watt was art master at St Columba’s High in Greenock, and though all four of his children attended the school, he made sure he taught none of them.

“There is nothing I hate more in the art world than children rehashing their mother’s or father’s paintings,” he says. “I know some artists and I feel like saying to them, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ It’s a bit sad, a father virtually imposing his personality on his children. All I did when was encourage them, no more than that. But Alison used to win competitions and people would say, ‘O, your dad did that for you’. Well, I didn’t.”

Watt was born in Port Glasgow and spent his own artistic education by the Clyde. His father, “an old school socialist” was a riveter, his grandfather too, and every man he knew worked in the yards. Poverty rooted families to the town for generations, yet everyone spoke the exotic language of the sea. His “total immersion” in this hard but strangely beautiful world gave Watt a canvas for life.

“The men, the women, the children, everyone used nautical terms,” he says. “Just as city children become streetwise, as river children, we were riverwise. We built rafts, we repaired old boats and sailed them. Everything we did prepared us to be shipbuilders.”

In the 1940s, this cocoon was punctured briefly by the arrival of Stanley Spencer, despatched by the government to work as a war artist in the town. Watt remembers Spencer sketching his Port Glasgow Resurrection series from hill above the cemetery and the way “he wheeled around his canvas and easel in an old pram”. Spencer “dressed weirdly, everyone’s idea of what an artist should be – something beyond our ken.” Watt never thought for a moment that he could be such a man.

It was an equally eccentric figure who finally connected him to his life’s work. Joe Kelly, a one-legged ex-miner from Lochgelly, arrived at his school to teach art when the boy was 15. Kelly was an enthusiast whose inspiration fired up Watt’s natural talent and sent him on his way through Glasgow School of Art.

Watt’s later encounter with the shipyard owner did not prove terminal. In his 20s and 30s, the painter toured Greenock’s harbours looking for inspiration and found it in the Lady Bute, a puffer tied to the wall. “It was an inspirational thing. I could stand 20 feet from it and yet see the entire puffer. It came to symbolise the whole of the Clyde.”

He spent summers on the little boats, watching the hard lives of their drink-addled crews unfold in front of him, painting the puffers and the ports they visited, and arriving on Islay or Harris, to be introduced as “Oor artist, Jum.” Not that he needed any ntroduction. Watt remembers the harbour master at Port Ellen telling a skipper, “Wullie, your Jum’s got more paint on his jumper than you’ve got on your puffer.”

These days, the puffers, like the yards have gone, and there’s “not so much as a rowing boat” in Greenock harbour – a decline recorded by Watt in thousands of paintings over five decades. That shipyard owner who so casually dismissed the struggling young artist might wish he’d kept just one picture as a keepsake.

Liz Lochhead's schooldays

The Times, April 14, 2008

In any other country, Liz Lochhead would qualify as a National Treasure. Author, translator, playwright, stage performer, Glasgow's poet laureate, grande dame of Scottish theatre, she bridges, with unassuming ease, the gap between the seriously literary and the outright popular. Last year she turned 60, and she takes as much pleasure from collecting her bus pass as she does from her new commission for the National Theatre of Scotland.

She shows no sign of slowing down. Next week, her latest play, Educating Agnes, a reworking of The School for Wives by Moliere, which she has written for Theatre Babel, opens at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow.

Before summer is over she should have completed her National Theatre script, Horse on Fire. On the horizon she has a teaching engagement at Eton College - a potential culture clash which she relishes. And she is mulling over the possibility of writing a new revue for this year’s Edinburgh fringe. The only thing wrong with being 60, she concludes, is her sense that life is shortening. “You’ve got a bus pass, but you don’t know how long you’ve got to run about, so you might as well have a great time.”

As she lingers over coffee at a café near her home in Glasgow’s West End, her claim that “I haven’t been this buzzed up for a while” quickly becomes utterly believable.

Since she translated Tartuffe 23 years ago, the French playwright Moliere has become a touchstone for Lochhead’s career. The words she uses to describe him – “shocking”, “cheeky”, “camp”, “outrageous” – could apply to her own verse, and her account of his death on stage in 1673, during a performance of La Malade Imaginaire, suggests that one day she may be game for the ultimate revival. “He had pulmonary TB, and he died in the wings, in a play he had written to disguise the cough he had. Imagine that. He’s extraordinary,” she says in wonder.

Educating Agnes is a comedy driven by the extremes of jealousy, and in Arnolphe, played by her old friend Kevin McMonagle, she has found a dominant central character who is the model for a certain type of man. He is, says Lochhead, “that fatal combination, a misogynist and a romantic.”

Lochhead is no French language scholar. For Educating Agnes, she worked in Glasgow’s Mitchell Library with a near-contemporary text alongside its English translation, a combination which enabled her to see the original rhyming scheme.

Like its predecessors she has rendered the play into Scots English. The significance of her chosen language may be obvious now, but it makes all the more extraordinary her past indifference to the issue of devolution. In 1979, she was in Canada during the first Scottish referendum and did not vote.

“We were feminists and the Labour Party kind of fudged it for us,” she recalls. “I wasn’t that interested and neither were my friends. I feel ashamed about that. Canadian nationalists would say: ‘What, you come from a country that’s not interested in having more say in its own affairs?’ I began to get more interested in nationalism. You could see parallels in their relationship with America.”

When Lochhead returned to Scotland – settling for good 25 years ago – her indifference melted away. By 1997, she was ready to say up all night for the referendum vote and now, though “not passionate” about independence, she sees it as a logical step.

“There have been some disappointing things,” she reckons. “The last First Minister, what was his name? Jack McConnell. Him and Bridget sitting there talking about his affair. Just so there would be no ‘smoking gun’. I thought, could there not be a time when people just say ‘I’m not going to do this stuff’? He tried pretty hard, but I was never a great fan.”

She is glad that Labour is out of power. Their “macho thing” had gone on for too long, combined with an institutional jiggery pokery in central Scotland which “they wouldn’t even see as corruption.”

An older, respectable Labour culture she knows well. Her father was a “John Smith Labourite” and she was grew up on a stolid post-war estate in Newarthill in Lanarkshire, an experience evoked in her poem, 1953. Lochhead had a gift for drawing and painting, and it was only after she had enrolled at Glasgow School of Art that she began writing.

In 1971, two of her poems won a competition. Travelling to Edinburgh to collect her prize, she met the writer Alasdair Gray on the train. They became friends and the following year, after he had been awarded an Arts Council grant, he paid for a typist to copy out her poems creating the transcript of her first book, Memo For Spring.

Lochhead stood out immediately, not just for the verve of her work, but because she had broken into a Scottish literary world dominated by male poets: Edwin Morgan, George MacKay Brown, Norman MacCaig. But although a dozen volumes of poetry have followed, she has increasingly turned to the stage, forging enduring friendships with writers and performers.

She chuckles over the Merryhell Theatre Company, whose brilliant revues she scripted with Gray, James Kelman and Tom Leonard. In 1982, they took a show called “The Pie of Damocles” to Edinburgh, and Lochhead vividly conjures up a triumph in the infamous bear pit of the late-night Fringe club.

“It smelt of performers’ fear. The dressing room was full of pints of urine, because everyone peed and then went on stage. It was like hell. Arthur Smith was on before us, getting booed and [the actress] Siobhan Redmond and me were quaking.

“Then Kevin McMonagle strode on very slowly in his white dinner jacket, and began to sing Tom Leonard’s My Way.” (Though some may mock/ the macho talk / upon the Walk / of No Surrender / I’ve drunk the rent / I’ve clocked the wife / I’ve spewed my ring upon the fender.) “There was silence, their jaws dropped open and then they clapped like mad. While they were still cheering, Siobhan and I ran on and did our stuff.”

Her songs from that era still captivate readers (I’m not your little woman / I’m not your better half / I’m not your nudge, your snigger / Or your belly laugh) and that warm glow could, she says, inspire another revue.

Working with young people fires her up. Five years ago she was writer in residence at Eton, and will return this autumn. The 12-year-olds wear tail coats “like Lord Snooty”, she says. “I’d be in a nice sitting room and they’d come in and toast crumpets and do their stuff. I would go, ‘Take me to Hotel du Posh.’ But I love it.”

Closer to home, she is friendly with 28-year-old playwright, Daniel Jackson, who has just won a residency at London’s Royal Court. “I think I’ve got a mentoring streak. Maybe it’s because I’ve got no kids. It’s exciting being around people who are beginning to find out things, especially people like Daniel. I think he is a more talented writer than me, but I’ve more experience.

“I dreamt on Sunday – I must be feeling slightly vulnerable – that Daniel was directing a piece of mine. He took me aside and said ‘This is shite.’ It took me all Sunday to forgive him. And it was just a dream.”

But only slightly vulnerable. Lochhead likes the notion of being a mad old woman, and revels in free travel on her bus pass, delighting in the fact that her husband, Tom Logan, six years her junior, has to pay full fare. And being 60 can be fun, she says. “In your 30s, as a woman, you’re scared to be too friendly with people in case they think you are trying to be too attractive. Do you know what I mean? All that bullshit just falls away.”

* Educating Agnes opens April 23, Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow

Visa fee hits arts festivals

The Times, March 6, 2008

Organisers of the Edinburgh International Festival and fringe, the Promenade concerts and many of Britain’s best-loved and most celebrated arts festivals are staring into a financial black hole because of changes in immigration rules which are being brought in by the Home Office.

Under the government proposals which are due to take effect this autumn, many international performers will be required for the first time to purchase a visa, at an estimated cost of £99 each. Orchestras, ballet and theatre companies, travelling from countries outside Europe, such as the USA and Australia will be hit by charges which could amount to thousands of pounds.

The proposals have provoked outrage from leading figures in the arts, who accused the government of precipitating a financial crisis and in failing in its own agenda to promote multiculturalism.

“This is like a massive, unbudgeted tax on internationalism in the arts. It’s crazy,” said Graham Sheffield, the artistic director of the Barbican in London. “Take an orchestra like the Los Angeles Philharmonic – you are talking about thousands of pounds on your budget. The potential for catastrophe, for it being very much more expensive and bureaucratic, is high.”

Paul Hughes, the general manager for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, warned that the changes would take their toll on events such as the Proms.

“It is likely to bring fewer artists to the country. For people bringing in whole orchestras, it will have an enormous impact. Other than as a pure money-making exercise for whoever owns the department of visas, I can’t imagine what the benefit is to anybody,” he said.

Under the current rules, visiting performers from “non visa national” countries such as the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia who play at festivals designated as “permit free” do not require a visa to enter the United Kingdom. Costs are also held in check for visiting orchestras, ballets and theatres who are able to tour under a work permit which costs just £190 and applies to the whole group.

A Home Office consultation on the arts ends on March 10, but under “Tier 5” of the new points-based rules for immigration, costs are expected to rise exponentially. As well as visa expenses, it has been propsed that each organisation will require a “certificate of sponsorship”, effectively a guarantee of good behaviour from its British promoter.

Though the cost of this is likely to be set at just £400 per company, each member of a touring party will require a certificate. The amount of bureaucracy that this might entail was mind-boggling, said Mr Sheffield.

“We are already having to row extremely hard not to go backwards. This is going to be a nightmare. They will have to employ several thousand civil servants just to process everything,” he said.

The Home Office changes are being made as part of a five-tier points-based immigration system which came into effect at the end of last month and effects all incomers from outside the European Union. Based on the Australian immigration model it is designed to ensure that “only those with skills the country needs can come to work and study,” according to Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.

However, arts organisations accuse the government of including the arts and entertainment industry only as an afterthought. The changes to the immigration system were a huge and important exercise for the counry, said Chloe Reddaway of the National Campaign for the Arts, but “the arts didn’t fit the model” she said.

“Instead of providing an arts and entertainment category that was specially set up, we are being squeezed into boxes that were never made for the arts sector. Everyone has been trying very hard to make that work but everyone keeps coming up with the fact that this is the wrong shape for the arts and entertainment. The sector is not generic, it rests on individual cases, and that is what the new system doesn’t accomodate,” said Ms Reddaway.

The Edinburgh Festival and fringe are vulnerable to the changes. The International Festival commissions work from a wide range of non-EU based companies and will be hit by a huge rise in costs under the proposals. Organisers of the Fringe, which last year hosted more than 2000 shows from all over the world, can expect a massive rise in bureaucracy – if performers are prepared to come to Scotland after costs go up.

A spokesman for the International Festival said the festival was “taking part in the consultation and taking a close interest in this issue."

What has bemused arts promoters is the government’s apparent abandonment of its ideal as Britain as a cultural hub.

Ms Reddaway said: “Think of the government’s creative industry policy, the Olympics, their interest in international trade and transferable skills, and the their diversity agenda. This policy runs completely contrary to all of that.”

The first changes to performer regulations were introduced last year and saw a rise in the cost of visas for countries including Russia, China, Cuba and India which have “visa national” status. Last night the Home Office said that no decision had been taken about whether to replace blanket visa covering groups such as orchestras with a system under which every group member must have a visa.

* Joint by-line with Dalya Alberge

Kennedy has the last laugh

The Times, Thursday, 24 January

With her long, unsmiling face, the novelist A L Kennedy is easy to distinguish from a ray of sunshine, but in public she performs with a witty self-confidence which rarely fails to surprise those who dismiss her as a miserablist.

Kennedy was at it again on Tuesday night as she collected the Costa Book of the Year for Day, her historical novel, which had already claimed the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year prize. In her acceptance speech she made a passionate plea for author’s rights to fair rewards, and against cost cutting retailers. This was, after all, the "most influential room that I could every play to".

It was to be expected. Whether she is reading from her books or delivering stand-up comedy, Kennedy’s fierce intelligence always demands attention.

She brought all of her intellect to bear in Day, a fiction based partially around the Forest of Dean and the Black Country, where her grandparents and parents once lived. More than five years in the making, whatever its strengths as a novel, Day is an impressive feat of historical research, which Kennedy undertook in part to understand how the world around her had been made.

The novel reveals the life of ‘Alfie’ Day, the former tail gunner of a Lancaster bomber, whose harrowing life is pieced together as the book unfolds: the brutal father, the put-upon, Methodist mother, the camaraderie of the bomber crews and their anxieties as they fly out towards death. As might be expected with Kennedy, there is no happy ending.

Joanna Trollope, the chair of the Costa judges, found Day comparable with the work of James Joyce and said the book was perfect and beautifully crafted. Yesterday, having broken a promotional tour in the United States to collect her award and despite her fear of flying, Kennedy jetted back across the Atlantic, where the New York Times has already compared “this gifted writer” to the Russian masters.

By now this author should be used to such accolades. Despite her evident dislike of awards – “prizes do not make sense” she writes on her website – she has been winning them throughout her professional career.

Alison Louise Kennedy was born in 1965, and brought up in Dundee. though notoriously cagey about her early years, her family’s religious background has plainly left a mark on her worldview, as did her parents’ divorce when she was 11.

After studying English and Drama at Warwick University, by 25 she was installed as writer in residence at Hamilton and East Kilbride social work department. Her first book, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains is described by the British Council – renowned for talking-up home-grown artists in colourful language –as “a bleak collection of short stories set in Scotland”.

Since then she has created a succession of difficult and challenging novels and short stories, and On Bullfighting, a non-fiction work which reveals how she contemplated suicide after the death of her maternal grandfather.

It is a pedigree which apparently cuts across her emergence as a stand-up comedian, but Kennedy, more than most, appears to understand that comedy is the flipside of tragedy. She first appeared on stage in 2005, and afterwards enjoyed a sellout run on the Edinburgh Fringe. She still performs, regularly in Edinburgh and Glasgow, but on stages all over Britain.

“Anyone who likes her writing, would like her stand-up. It is the same dry style which she has in her writing which she brings to her routine. There are very well crafted jokes there, but it is not ‘ho ho ho’ type comedy,” said Tommy Sheppard, the owner of the Stand clubs.

Kennedy lives in a flat in Glasgow’s West End, a seemingly determined loner, plagued by a bad back. She doesn’t care much for journalists, but appears to delight in the question and answer features which fill up magazine pages. In one telling answer, she urged would-be writers to avoid using drugs or drink as stimulants.

“Sometimes your substance of choice will sucker you in with a little good foreplay (writing you would have produced anyway) but eventually you’ll end up on the rag heap with Dylan Thomas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Brendan Behan and all the rest of the much more numerous drunks and junkies who didn’t even make it to visibility before they destroyed themselves.

“You do this by yourself, because you are made that way. Try faking it and it will f*** you and your ability to do what you were born to do. But feel free to try it the other way first, many people do. It's frightening to write - people who are frightened run to substances. That's normal - but we can't run from the fear. We need it.”

Kennedy still teaches creative writing, but advocates “just write” if you want to succeed as an author. Her own love of her craft and her endless pursuit of perfection suggest we have not seen the best of her yet.

Art, sport and the history of IPA

The Times, January 7, 2008

The problem with a five-star success, as any Hollywood producer knows, is how to follow it up. It is conundrum the artist Douglas Gordon has been wrestling with since 2006 when rave reviews for his film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, spilled out of the arts pages into the sports supplements. This brilliant production, said one critic, was ideal if your “idea of a perfect Saturday is a morning at the Tate Modern followed by an afternoon at the match.”

Now at last, Gordon and his co-director Philippe Parreno have settled on the sequel. Ratcheting up the testosterone levels, they are shifting focus from football to bullfighting, from the enigma of Zinedine Zidane, the great French player, to José Tomás, Spain’s most famous matador.

Gordon is a Turner Prize winner, breathes the rarefied air of contemporary art. But he is a disarmingly unpretentious man, who chuckles as he describes how he was swept up in the cult of Tomás.

Last summer the bullfighter returned to the ring in Barcelona after a self-imposed exile from the sport of five years. Expectation was high and the stadium packed. Tomás did not disappoint, producing a brilliantly mannered performance and – despite being knocked to the ground - was carried out of the arena shoulder high in triumph. Gordon was agog.

“It was the most astonishing bullfight I’d seen. He is an amazing character who has obviously gone against the grain in that very macho culture and Philippe and I are interested in him as a matador. But we can also see things from the point of view of the animal, this beautiful beast,” recalls the artist. He envisages his film as “a game between the matador and the bull,” which will employ all the artfulness and technology which created Zidane – 16 cameras were trained on the footballer throughout a full match, to achieve an astonishingly intimate portrayal “every bit as detailed as a painting or a photograph”.

Winning Tomás’s continuing support for the film which will take months to plan and execute may not be decisive – another matador could step into the limelight - but with the spectre of an EU ban hanging over bullfighting, time is of the essence.

The urgency of the project only adds to the sense of activity and optimism which surrounds the artist. Eighteen months ago during the Edinburgh retrospective of his work Gordon was still coming to terms with the break up of his relationship with Anna Gaskell, and fretting over how he might maintain a closeness with his young son in New York.

Now he is relaxed and assured and in the throes of moving back to Glasgow, which hasn’t been his permanent base since 2000. Gordon is looking forward to playing golf and watching Scotland’s efforts in football’s World Cup qualifiers. And he has any number of artistic projects on the go.

The last “astonishing summer” convinced him to return to Europe. It wasn’t just Barcelona. Gordon participated in the ‘artists’ opera’, which was part of the Manchester Festival and spent enough “fallow time” in Scotland to make him realise that he had been a “bit too cranked up” In New York. He will keep a flat in Manhattan, and probably buy another in Berlin, but he already has two places in Glasgow, one of which, near Park Circus, is being converted into a non-profit-making gallery. Gaskell is likely to be one of the first artists to exhibit there.

The notion of an exhibition space in his house was dreamt up with Katrina Brown, an old friend who is the former director of Dundee Contemporary Arts. Over dinner, she told Gordon about her Common Guild foundation which is dedicated to mounting public programmes of contemporary art. “I said, ‘I have a big town house in Glasgow, but I only ever live in the kitchen. Why don’t we try to run it as an art space?’ “

The homecoming is enticing to an artist who feels both Scottish and European. “It made sense to get back to a context in which I was challenged in a different way. And people didn’t keep saying to me, ‘O your accent is so cute’, and I didn’t have to predicate everything I said with subtitles.”

Gordon was born the eldest of four children in Maryhill, Glasgow, where he absorbed all the obsessions which beset many Scottish men growing up in 1970s: sex, death, football and religion. When he was four, his mother became a Jehovah’s Witness; at nine, Gordon was giving Bible readings to audiences of 200 at the Kingdom Hall.

He would have studied literature and history and university if his guidance teacher hadn’t persuaded him to apply for Glasgow School of Art. Now at 42, he intends to right that decision and will apply to study the Reformation at St Andrews University. It should help, he says, in one of his current projects, “to rewrite the Bible”.

“I was in Germany recently looking at works by Cranach. There is a beautiful portrait of Martin Luther, and I thought, ‘Douglas, you just don’t know half as much as you should. Maybe it’s time to go back to school. You can be one of those cool, mature students for once.’”

Luther he admires for his “attempt at inevitable failure”, his 1517 protest. “I think what interests me in it – it’s very tricky - is that aspect of Protestantism which is the introduction of choice as oppose to dogma. We know that a few hundred years later it became dogmatic, but in those days …”

He lets that thought drift off. “If I study in St Andrews and have a flat in Berlin, I can go and see a lot of the paintings and go to Wittenburg.”

And you can study religion and have fun, he reckons. As if to prove the point, his most recent experiences in Berlin – absorbing the art of Cranach and Durer – were leavened by his new career as restaurant reviewer for the French edition of Playboy. He calls his column 24 Hours Gastronomy, echoing the title of arguably his best known work, 24 Hour Psycho. It first ran last October with a despatch from St Andrews.

“I thought I should start it off with a little patriotic nod. ‘Dear Reader’, it began, ‘I’m sitting aboard an Airbus, coming in from Charles De Gaulle to Edinburgh airport … Don’t go directly to St Andews. Stop off at the Oxford Bar in Edinburgh and have a pint of IPA.’ I give them a wee history of India Pale Ale. Then we stopped off in Crail for a lobster, we played golf, we went to St Monans for dinner. The French Playboy people loved it.”

He even takes his own photographs on his camera phone and e-mails them into the office. Now wonder Yan Ceh, the editor-in-chief of the magazine, lists Gordon as one of his heroes on his YouTube website.

In Berlin he wanted to dine in an exclusive restaurant, frequented by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. “I called the concierge and asked him to book. He said ‘Zees is not possible.” I said: ‘I am the food and drink editor of French Playboy magazine and I’d like to check the place out.’ I had a table in five minutes.”

Not bad, he laughs, for a man from Maryhill.

John Bellany

This one's from a few years ago - you can read the article if you click the link on the the right hand side of the page.

John Bellany is one of Scotland's best known artists, who uses language almost as vividly as he does paint. He beautifully evokes his Calvinist childhood and remembers days in Milne's Bar, Edinburgh with the nationalist poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, whose "words wafted out of the window like cigarette smoke".

Bellany's Edinburgh flat is magnificent, full of huge canvases from his earliest days. He was an hypnotic talker and even his wife Helen, gentle, soft spoken and very elegant, sat listening for much of the time, as if she'd never heard it before. As I was leaving Bellany gave me a hug and said " I've found a soul-mate". And that was without having a drink.