Literally Indescribable?:

Ever since I wrote a brief introductory text for Stuart Murray, who had provided a brace of drawings for the 'DEVIANT' issue of The Drouth, I had wanted to write a fuller essay on his work. The chance seemed to come with his show down at the Cell Project Space gallery in Bethnal Green. I was heading down to London that July for a wedding, and could call in on the exhibition. I had Saatchi magazine lined up to publish a short review - all was, apparently in place.

It was a good wedding, good enough that I had such a head on me that only a wander in the sunshine the day after could really cure. And so, quite the flaneur, I walked around Bethnal Green, stumbling on a free exhibition of Picasso prints and an excellent, if unhygienic coffee-stand. When I got to Cell I was confronted by piles of Murray's books stacked at a series of tables. The method was obvious, so I sat down at the first one and started to read. I found that reading Stuart Murray slightly hung over was not only thematically appropriate, it added an element of empathy to my reading of the dour, boozed up souls that grace his pages. It sucked me in, and the cumulative effect of all that work, effort and observation, and the funny, tragic perspective fully hit me; for the first time the scope of what Murray had done, book by book became clear. I was moved, nearly tearful. These cartoons weren't funny at all. After almost an hour I came out of the gallery with a clear head and the intention to write the definitive essay on Stuart Murray.

I blame many things for what did not then happen. On the train back up, where I intended to make hay I fell asleep and woke up at Central Station, still exhausted and with terrible pins and needles. The next morning I woke up to a stack of 'to-dos' that never seemed to get any shorter. I started the piece and stopped as something else captured my attention. I started to raise money to make a film, little realizing just how long it took fill in certain application forms. I still had a magazine to run, and students to teach. Time stretched, I found myself negotiating deadlines for a single review, something I had never done before. I felt terribly unprofessional. Then the funders of my film demanded more supporting material, and I duly went off to the photocopier.

Somehow I dashed off a space-filler review to Saatchi. It never appeared, and I was on a certain level, relieved, as it said none of the things I wanted it to. I went to Prague in November, hoping to find time to write, perhaps as I strolled pensively along the banks of the Vltava (and presumably, body swerving stag nights and dawdling American tourists. So hard to maintain, these intellectual poseur escape fantasies... In the event I spent most of my spare time fielding phonecalls about the film, and checking Drouth copy, and in reality spent even more time in museums and Beer Halls. Stag nights proved impossible to dodge - not Kafka's city any more. I did lay my hands on a book of Kafka's illustrations, and blew the last of my Czech Kroner on it. The book gave me some ideas for the piece that I never really got to use, though they made their way into a Drouth essay I wrote about drawing, 'The Democracy of Line(s)'. But still no Murray opus was forthcoming.

Somewhere along the way, due to hasty apologies and reassurances to my elusive subject, I vowed to write an essay especially for this website. This made me feel better for a while, and I was sure I would now be able to reserve just that bit of time I needed, and with the fresh start make good on my promises. What actually happened was that the funder came back with money to make the film. Almost immediately, my life became an endless struggle to fit enough into one day. The year began to disappear. It wasn't just time however. I also draw, obsessively, compulsively and regularly, strange, twisted, abhuman sketches fished straight from my subconscious, and usually in a suit and tie. Since I was four not a day has went by I think, when I have not drawn something. Murray's medium was something I felt a deep affinity with. It made it difficult to contain all my thoughts and impressions. The funnel writers use to squeeze ideas through and into their words was dangerously blocked. Every attempt to write was frustrated by an embarrassing lack of juice.

So they accumulated. I would open a new word document, batter out some sentences or the eccentricities of some idle thought, save it as the first line (i.e. 'Stuart Murray is obviously') and then leave it. It would sit forgotten while I tried something else. Some starts would be more promising than others, but that is usually where time intervened and I would lose momentum. I forgot where I put most of them, and thought I'd lost a few to a hard-drive failure (and maybe there are a couple I did, and have entirely forgotten about). I started to put more work into my excuses than the essay. A deep, dark, black and blue Karmic stain spread across the cockles of my heart. September crept up. I was writing a chapter for a book, on the subject of James Boswell and Robert Burns, and I recalled a small something I had written about Lord George Murray, the famous Jacobite General that might prove ripe for recycling. I went to my spotlight feature and searched for 'Murray'. I didn't find anything about Lord George, but did find the seven word files represented below, seven failed attempts to be definitive. The germ of a thought started to sprout, but I quickly moved on to chasing up Boswell quotes. Only a couple of days later I ran into Stuart over free drinks at StreetLevel, and the idea I had been kicking around suddenly formed itself: Confess, and go forward to serve the Lord George Murray with a clean conscience. Stuart liked the idea and so here, at last, after a year's prevarication, is my non-essay about Stuart Murray. It's not quite what I planned in the beginning, but as is often the case, it will just have to do.

(This has to win the award for shortest false start, from around July 2007, written on the train up from London. I was tired, and decided to sleep instead of writing.) Stuart Murray, is obviously Scotland's most interesting documentary film maker. Except he doesn't make films and for all I know, doesn't own a camera.

(I feel a bit sad for this one, as it was in danger of getting interesting. From summer 2007, trying to find something that tied in with London.) In his London Journals James Boswell regularly inserted his 'DIALOGUES AT CHILDS'. These were snippets of conversation he overheard at his favourite watering hole and chophouse, recorded carefully in his notes as he read the free newspapers. Subjects tended to be trivial, yet noteworthy - for example, two men discuss places they have eaten beefsteak, and with whom, or a grocer asks a physician how many people he has killed today. It was 'low talk', but to Boswell it represented his experience of London tavern life. Frederick Pottle called them conversations 'caught in an eternal sunbeam', and it is true they have a unique sense of light and life. If Boswell caught his encounters in sunbeams, what preservatives is Stuart Murray using? The people who inhabit his books of drawings seem more at home in dark corners and niches. Murray's depiction of them is sympathetic yet merciless, stripping them of any pretence and presenting them as damaged, inglorious ink poppets

(This, the longest fragment, is from late summer 2007, and ends with me berating myself for over-egging the theoretical pudding. In the event I cut and changed this substantially for the London magazine that wanted it, a scootery review that I was never happy with. I can't actually find the original review, and have a feeling I battered it our on someone else's computer. I'm not mourning its loss too much… This is as close as I got to finishing the piece I wanted to write, until it was left to lie on some virtual shelf, gathering virtual dust...) No end, no beginning

'Couthiness' is a particularly Scottish word for a particularly Scottish affliction. Roughly translated as 'agreeable' or 'genial', it has taken on increasingly Tory over and undertones; accepting, trivialising, complacent. Couthy folk are as twee as the White Heather Club or the books of Molly Weir. The crowning achievement of Scottish couthiness was the work of Dudley D Watkins, the (English) artist behind our national comic strips, Oor Wullie and The Broons. Leaving aside the oddness , verging on national psychosis in having a national comic strip in the first place, drawings of the Scottish working class instantly conjure up Watkins' superbly detailed evocations of a Dundee single end - and a corresponding suspicion among those who congratulate themselves as too sophisticated to fall for the gentle humour of Paw Broon or the delinquent Wullie. The sophisticates know they are lying to themselves and everyone else, which only deepens their hatred, their natural mistrust of any depiction of Scottish everymen.

So when Stuart Murray memorises signature aspects of the individuals he meets - the crease in a jowl, the crinkle in a collar or hemline, what sort of pint they have in front of them - and draws these features in black ink lines, we are instantly on our guard. He also retains an ear for conversation, invective and oral cadence, and scrawls the most captionable snippets next to or around the central drawing, at times threatening to crowd it out altogether. Still on our guard - one of the distinguishing features of the Watkins strip was their frequently creative use of phonetic dialect. Both drawing and handwriting are scratchy and rudimentary, they are technically deficient in many aspects. They look as if they were done in minutes - and as the artist himself would admit, do not take long to produce. But he clearly thinks about them for quite some time. Murray seems to refute his own painstaking preparation by churning out a drawing in a matter of minutes. Heads are too large for bodies; arms curl out of the torso at the wrong angle, or are different sizes, breasts are represented by mere kinks in the pen-line (Duncan MacLaren has pointed out their resemblance to Mike Judge's work on Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill). So can he draw, or does he choose not to?

This doesn't seem to matter. Murray has over the years built a strong and loyal following in Glasgow as well as growing recognition from the Scottish art world. He recently received special commissions to visit Bucharest, to produce a series of images for literary quarterly The Drouth and perhaps most exotic of all, a special series of drawings in Edinburgh's National Portrait gallery for MAP magazine. His self-produced books of drawings are almost perversely low-fi but highly prized by those able to get a copy. For aficionados, the value lies in the imperfections of his execution of the idea and the grit, patience, isolation, banter and time expended in seeking out and establishing its sources - not to mention the undisturbed flow from the artist's practice into his personal life, and vice versa. His subjects are after all, work colleagues - Work, a handsome folio in a sturdy brown envelope brings us face to face with a series of angry postmen (read this and the postal strike will make perfect sense) - or as in On the Street, beggars trying the same trick again and again, too wasted to know when they've hit a mark twice, recording almost as a hellish, Dante-like cycle of misery and desperately held pretensions, halfway between cynicism and pathos. Then there is the comedy of People I've Met While Working, a succession of doorways and letterboxes, each person framed in their own portal and for the most part, exceedingly angry. Murray's work is also energised by the invective, rants and verbal rambles he scoops out of everyday life and language, and records in his sloping handwriting. His bar crawlers and beer-bowsers seem to be extensions of their own words; doodles in the margins of some never-ending round of existential homework. He depicts men and women, but seems mostly simpatico with the men he meets, with whom he develops alarming levels of frankness (he seeds his Deviant series with an anecdote about 'lager enemas' sure to provoke many a double take). Murray's inky worldview has a peculiar authenticity; he is no cool professional that turns his subject into a sleek, slick coffee-table set-piece, but a part of the subject. And perhaps this is why his drawings are so defiantly unfinished - there is no convenient endpoint for those of us who are already there.

Anyone familiar with Scottish literature of the past 40 years - especially the west coast strain of it - will recognise its abiding 'walking wounded' theme, of battered and crusty souls nursing private hurts amid endemic social decay. But Murray's output updates the sensibility of James Kelman's Not Not While The Giro and How Late It Was, How Late to the living present. Projects such as On The Street, and People I've Met While Working document the gradual rebranding of areas such as Candleriggs into The Merchant City, while 7 Week Filing Job is poised partway between Kafka and Kelman in retelling an account of an office temping job as a descent into a particularly numbing, mediocre hell. Whereas many of these protagonists existed on a pole - beautiful but stranded souls, or decayed and embittered remnants - so many of Murray's subjects are merely mediocre, even bland. They are located within Glasgow with the acute sense of geographic specificity you would expect from a postie, located in Murray's native east end/his postal route or the artists' warrens that replaced the Merchant City's markets and offices. Were we to reduce our considerations to a broad comparison against another local boy, then he is the anti-Douglas Gordon, localised, parochial, impudently low tech and entirely self-sufficient. Gordon studies the form and face of Zinadine Zidane, Murray the bull-necked bruiser from top flat right.

But Murray's technique has proved remarkably portable, making such glib dichotomies misleading. His work for MAP revisited a number of portraits by Ramsay, Raeburn and Martin of the leading figures of Edinburgh's enlightenment. In redrawing David Hume, Lord Braxfield and the fiddler Neil Gow he presents a unique visual transcript of very familiar works (his spindly-sausage-finger version of Neil Gow recalls Robert Louis Stevenson's remark that Raeburn was 'unhappy in hands') but appropriately enough for the republic of letters, this is primarily a linguistic adventure. The trademark Murray scrawl under Hume's portrait recalls his thoughts on purging his English of Scotticisms, while his Kames celebrates the great Scottish jurists pride in his robust Scots, greeting men as 'ye brutes' and women as 'ye bitches'. These are people making themselves up, recreating themselves and even abstracting who they are, something Murray seems to get on the most intuitive of levels. Beyond that there is the thrill of seeing the portraitist, the artist who isolates and atomises have his subject wrested away from him and into Murray's version of representational truth.

But the 'big' transplant remains that great metropolitan shift southwards, and whether the consummate Glasgow prole in London can be any more than a stage Scotsman - a city currently home to the most powerful, most dour stage-Scotsman on the planet? Would London audiences see his cast of drunks, deadbeats, bolshie postmen and men in receipt of 'lager enemas' as anything more than just another species of the legendary Glesga stage drunk, of boozy clowns and hard men with hearts of gold? The first attempt to stage an exhibition in London is an encouraging sign that, whatever visitors think of these drawings, curators in the city understand something of what he is trying to achieve. The Stuart Murray exhibition in Bethnal Green's Cell Project Space effected a neat shift between Glasgow and London respective east ends, both areas indelibly associated (romantically or otherwise) with clannish working class allegiances, general neglect and persistent gangsterism. Murray and the curators have put together a clever, illuminating and sympathetic showcase. Tucked into an attic space, editions of Murray's books from the last half-decade are splayed onto four or five different tables. Visitors can sit down and table hop from book to book, and if they feel so moved, take one up to the counter and buy a copy. This approach serves Murray's virtues well, allowing the visitor to settle into exploring his output in the way intended. Gradually, one passes from superficial judgements over technique and the apparent 'stage Glaswegian' element to a deeper understanding of what he is trying to achieve.

The cumulative effect of these piles and piles of book is deeply moving, as you come to realise how penetrative and astute these drawings are - and how accurate. They pick up facial ticks, smirks, boils and the sheen of NHS glasses with almost unbearable clarity - as if we are seeing all of them simultaneously. Not least, there is a shocking sense of intimacy that can only come from drawings, from the notion that Murray has allowed us to see directly how images appear in his head.

By playing on these ambiguities between personal and private, 'on' and 'offtime' he is in some respects confirmed as the last of the modernists, a true documentarian. Documentary scholar Ray Carney could have been speaking of Murray when he wrote 'Art is not somewhere else; it is in life, and absolutely continuous with it.' He was actually referring to the great Albert and Robert Maysles, the two Jewish boys from Massachusetts who revolutionised documentary film in the sixties and seventies, but it applies equally to Murray's achievement. There is further resonance in the words of the great modernist critic Daniel Joseph Signal, when he defined it as 'The celebration of the animal component of human nature, the quest for spontaneity and authenticity, the desire to raze all dualisms and distinctions … the quest for "wholeness", the effort to expand consciousness and discover new modes of experience.' GETTING TOO THEORETICAL MITCHELL...

(The magazine never used the piece and I had lost the 'for press' version, and was feeling generally very sheepish and ducking and rolling every street corner, lest the irked artist find me. Around this time I decided to just write an essay on Stuart anyway, and perhaps give it to him. The next fragment is not so much a beginning, as a part of the middle somewhere, that came to me after I brought back a book of Kafka's drawings from Prague in November 2007. This was probably to slot in to the piece above) And oddly enough, Kafka is again recalled, a literary artist whose doodled-over diaries bleed into his literary output. His drawings are spiky abstractions of the people he knew, twisted into shape by his own anxieties - or his own K initial, mutated into demented stick-man 'marionettes'. How anxious then, is Murray? On the surface, not at all. Murray comes across as remarkably integrated into the solipsistic world he depicts, his artistic ambitions compatible with his personal life. Then again, there is something disquieting in the way he depicts the people around him as mere sketches, something painful in the failure to realize them as something more fully fleshed, convincing, that is, reassuringly solid. His subjects are flakes, and he draws them just as ragged and crunchy as anything from a Kellogg's box (Mr. Kellogg was of course, all for enemas, but his use of lager is highly doubtful…) Furthermore, there is no end or beginning with Murray's practice. He does not simply swoop in, depict, then leave the settings of his books, he is entirely a part of them. And that, in itself, is a little unnerving

(Another fragment from January 2008, upon re-reading some of the exhibition literature) Referencing Murray's trademark 50s quiff, long jacket and winklepickers, Neil Mulholland described Murray as the last 20th century man to be found in the ever-so-hungry, aggressively thrusting 21st century

(Aroundabout this time, if my memory at all serves, I had vowed on pain of my own death, to write an essay especially for the Stuart Murray website. I couldn't find the original effort at this point, so was back to square one. Time to start again... This is from Spring 2008, written on a train - and then the battery went...)

A famous artist who represents a Glasgow progressively being shoved out by its countless image makeovers, a resurgent, stubborn refugee from the 21st century who is nevertheless, adored even for existing, Murray represents a myriad of contradictions. Whether he continues to tread the postal route or opts for the metropolitan high road, these

(Later this year I saw an exhibition by E.J Major. It impressed me so much I was inspired to start the Murray piece again, perhaps adding in some EJ for a bit of comparison. I got further than I had all year…This from late summer 2008)

Where does the drawing begin and the writing end? Stuart Murray's characteristic scrawl, spread either side of his faux-naïve - or sham-shite - drawings is as much a visual as a discursive experience. His portraits of Glaswegian operatives, scraps of conversation, observations, pained submissions to the inevitable, have become a fixture of 'zine fairs, book art and other stops on the Glasgart circuit. Rarely has solipsism held such wide appeal.

A Stuart Murray book consists of black ink drawings on white paper, with a picture of the subject - say for example, some old codger remonstrating in a pub. Scrawled next to it, in Murray's spider handwriting will be a snatch of said codger's conversation. The drawing will look naïve but is in fact very detailed, capturing the glitches in said codger's teeth or the stitching on his polo neck. It captures the feeling of the detail more than the actuality of it.