NEIL Dempsie lives in Chicago, and is famously reclusive. There hasn't been a new photo of him for very many years.
He has had 70 major exhibitions in the States since he started painting in 1960. His style, best described as naïve-representationa
l, was never of the period, or of any period. It appeals to the man and woman in the street, as well as to the sophisticated nostalgist. Banks and public institutions have bought him, because they are deemed to be client-friendly works (as well as a sound investment).
Street scenes. A Scottish market town. Stepped corbie-stane gables. White or grey harled walls. Cobbles. A clock tower. Stone steps, once used for mounting horses.
Gas lamps. Cars with running boards and mudguards. An occasional horse and cart (the coalman, the rag-and-bone man, 'Tattie Tam, The Name for Potatoes'), delivery boys on bicycles, townsfolk strolling in their Sunday best, dogs up to mischief and cats arching their backs.
Sometimes in this town it rains, and puddles cleverly catch the reflections of buildings. Or snow falls, and you realise that the view of wintry square at dusk with illuminated windows and pools of light falling on to whitened cobbles would make a very nice corporate Christmas card (eg WE WISH ALL OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS REGARDS FOR THIS FESTIVE SEASON).
The world has moved on, but this place has remained reassuringly constant. That's why the public has made Dempsie so popular.
In his paintings there's stillness and tranquillity. Robert Louis Stevenson once began a story "I was a great solitary when I was young", and Dempsie's characters all appear to be alone to themselves, even when they're together. A man stands at a street corner looking in one direction; indoors a woman at a window lifts the net curtain and looks the other way. A girl propels her push-scooter with her foot, a boy has been sent out to walk the dog, and they both – from opposite sides of the canvas – catch the painter's eye. No-one is where they are, so you believe, wholly by accident. The cars never grow any sleeker or acquire chrome and fins; they stay as they are – chunky, square-ish, with running boards and big bug's-eye headlights.
The town is surrounded by the darkness of countryside at night. The deep murk feels ancient. In fact, as Dempsie has explained, it's the nocturnal darkness of a town living through a war, with curfews enforceable by law.
As a boy I was sent away to a small town in the foothills of the Scottish Highlands: a place called Carnbeg, an old spa resort.
It was 1940. I was an evacuee, boarding with strangers.
When there wasn't any school, I used to walk through the streets and run about the vennels (lanes]. I got to know Carnbeg like the back of my young ten-year-old's hand.
Sometimes there were alarms. We were meant to stay indoors, but that was when I liked to sneak out. So did a few others, but we kept apart.
The streets empty, drivers halt and switch off their engines; the cars will be recovered later. In rooms, hands reach out to close black-out curtains. A party balloon tied to a railing is forgotten. "Put out that light!" When the gas supply goes on the peep, an eerie blue light fills the streets.
Those were magical escapes. I imagined that I owned the little town! I wasn't afraid, even though the buildings seemed bigger and their shapes odder.
I then felt especially alert and receptive; I seemed to be looking at things for the first time.
That's the sense – one of wonderment – which I've tried to recreate in my pictures.
People who haven't been to Carnbeg, let alone travelled to Scotland, or even to Europe, think they recognise the place.
He receives many letters, or e-mails passed on from galleries or publishers, telling him what his pictures mean to Grace Lundgren in Cedar Rapids or Tom O'Brien in Phoenix or the Gooden family up near Walla Walla. Most of those correspondents will never own an original, but that doesn't bother them. His posters and postcards sell well, as does the calendar, which is a new merchandising line.
As a rule, whether he is painting sunshine or gaslight, he never paints shadows. Neither do kids when they paint. (That's why his work is called naïve, and why the public lap it up and feel protective about it – like childhood, here is somewhere for them to take refuge.)
I saw his most recent painting on a Chicago gallery's website. It's called Circling the Square. In this he has given everyone a shadow, and the few cars also, and the rag-and-bone man's cart, and the Tollbooth, and the lowping stone.
What is the significance of those shadows? They ought to give the figures and the objects more substance. But it strikes me that the humans are puzzled and uncertain, suddenly awkward with themselves in the streets where they used to go about carefree. Even the tower of the Tollbooth seems to stand a little unsure, as if burdened by its own longevity and picturing its own eventual fall in rubble across those cobbles.
Nothing, and nobody, lasts.
In my mind's eye this latest – final? – canvas is hanging in pride of place in the gallery's window. A small assemblage of figures are gazing out with bewilderment through the plate glass from 60 years ago, already half-lost, misted by the gaudy reflection of the Marina City Towers.
While I'm in reflective mood…
In their Briggait window, Ridout & McColm currently feature an item in a forthcoming auction. The inscription on the brass plaque attached to the handsome glass case reads "Brown Trout Landed Loch Bragar 12lbs 4 August 1914".
That was the same day on which Great Britain declared war on Germany.
On Loch Bragar meanwhile they stubbornly played out normality.
The fish swims behind curved glass, against a painted plaster background of muddy-blue underwater currents.
Whatever happened to the strong-armed victor in that contest out on the loch? No person's name is attached. Only the fish survives, a noble specimen: on the far side of apocalypse, occupying its never-ending Edwardian summer.
The full article contains 1074 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
