Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [142]
When the project of opening the district by railways was first mooted it created much alarm in the canal company, lest traffic be wholly diverted from their navigation. The alarm was not unfounded, but it only induced the company to reduce their dues by two thirds and expend large sums on improvements to facilitate traffic. New locks were made at Blackhill, of a character excelling all works of their class in Great Britain. They comprised two entire sets of four double locks each, either set being worked independently of the other; and were formed at the expense of upward of £30,000. In 1846, when the Monkland Canal became one concern with the Forth and Clyde Canal, the purchase price was £3,400 per share.
The canal had closed to traffic before he was born. From a channel carrying trade into the depth of the country it had become a ribbon of wilderness allowing reeds and willows, swans and waterhens into the heart of the city. He was puzzled by the phrase “splendid edifices were called into existence.” The only splendid building he knew east of the city was the canal itself, a ten-mile-long artwork shaped in stone, timber, earth and water. He went to sketch the Blackhill locks.
This was difficult. He knew how the two great water staircases curved round and down the hill, but from any one level the rest were invisible. Moreover, the weight of the architecture was seen best from the base, the spaciousness from on top; yet he wanted to show both equally so that eyes would climb his landscape as freely as a good athlete exploring the place. He invented a perspective showing the locks from below when looked at from left to right and from above when seen from right to left; he painted them as they would appear to a giant lying on his side, with eyes more than a hundred feet apart and tilted at an angle of 45 degrees. Working from maps, photographs, sketches and memory his favourite views had nearly all been combined into one when a new problem arose.
He had meant to people the canvas with Sunday afternoon activity: children fishing for minnows with jam-jars, a woman clipping a hedge round an old lockkeeper’s cottage, a pensioner exercising a dog on the towpath. But the locks now looked so solid that he wanted them to frame something vaster. He opened the last book of the bible and read of ultimatums and proclamations, of war, starvation, profiteering and death, of flaming bodies hurled through the sky to poison whole nations. The politics of the book seemed as modern as in the days of St. John and Albrecht Dürer. The final splitting of people into good and bad and the survival of the good into a luxurious new world was unconvincing, but politicians usually talk like that in a crisis. He changed the time of day from afternoon to gloaming and made a black descending dart high up between the moon and the roof of his old primary school. Being painted on the sky it could not fall, nor could the crowds under it escape. They fled along towpaths, over bridges, and collected on heights, yet there was no brutality in their fearful rush: mothers still clung to children, fathers shielded both, on open spaces single figures pointed to doors in the hillside. To show the crowds properly he made great changes in the landscape and these were nearly complete when a new need arose. In that huge multitude only types were visible, and he suddenly wanted a life-size figure in the foreground, someone whose bewildered face looked straight at the viewers, making them feel part of the multitude too.
Thaw stopped to think, for the whole composition would have to be rearranged again if the new figure was to fit it and not be just stuck on top. His painting teacher, a conscientious man, approached and said, “How much longer will you be on this? It’s all you’ve done this term. The others have finished three or four paintings by now.”
“Mine is bigger than theirs, sir.”
“Bigger, yes. Ridiculously big. When will you