Obituary: George Carson

GEORGE Garson served the unlikeliest of apprenticeships for someone who would become a mosaicist, stained glass artist and senior lecturer at Glasgow School of Art – he was a shipwright at Henry Robb's Leith and Burntisland yards.

Seafaring was in his blood thanks to an Orcadian grandfather and a merchant seaman father who kept the family's Orcadian links alive.

In his book Orkney All the Way Through, published in 1992, George Garson wrote: "I've heard tell there used to be as many Garsons in Orkney as there are coopats in a field of coos … From the old Norse garor, a dyke that makes an enclosure, it is a common element in farm names long since shortened to gar … Old township dykes were also known as garths, hence the common name, Garson – garos-endi, dyke-end."

So the son of the dyke-end may have grown up in a two-roomed tenement in Edinburgh but the light of Orkney was in his eyes from the first, and he had become an accomplished amateur painter by the time he completed his apprenticeship at Leith.

He went to some pains to keep his artistic tendency a secret from his shipyard colleagues for fear of heaped scorn or worse. But word eventually leaked out when an early group exhibition in Edinburgh was reviewed by The Scotsman's art critic Sidney Goodsir Smith, who singled him out as "the poet of the bunch".

George Garson won round his shipyard detractors by drawing chalk caricatures of them on ship-plates – heroic ones for his fellow shipwrights, unheroic ones for the foremen.

The craftsmanship his job demanded and the ferociously socialist ambience of the shipyards in the 1950s informed the kind of artist – and teacher – he would become.

But first he had to resolve an inner conflict. Such was his desire to paint that he embarked on deception at home, leaving early in the morning for work at the yards but heading into town instead, hanging around until the National Gallery of Scotland opened, then spending days poring over paintings and sketchbooks.

Eventually he was spotted by a neighbour, his wife Jean found out, and being the remarkable woman she was, she threw him a lifeline. She told him to do it properly, to enrol in art college and she would take on extra work to make ends meet.

So in 1960 and at the age of 30, George Garson went to Edinburgh College of Art. At his interview, he presented a small portfolio of paintings to, among others, William Gillies, who suggested that his daring use of colour could be put to good use in stained glass. His tutors at Edinburgh included Sax Shaw (stained glass), Kingsley Cook (mosaic) and the painter John Busby. It was Cook who recognised Garson's rare talents as a mosaicist and lobbied the college to take him on as a lecturer when he graduated.

In 1971, he was appointed head of mural design and stained glass at Glasgow School of Art and it was there that the fully-fledged artist spread his wings and also established a reputation as a gifted teacher.

His manner was uncompromising. He made waves. His vocabulary was shipyards. And he was an alcoholic. His students either wilted or flourished in the sizzling atmosphere. A few would show him undying love that would eventually sustain him in the last few months of his life.

Inevitably he fell foul of college administrators from time to time, but they weighed the inconvenience against the results he achieved. His department was in the school of design when he joined GSA, but within six years, external examiners upgraded it to fine art because his students were working in so many disciplines. "My design school colleagues were no' very amused," he observed.

His own work was given a lasting impetus by a holiday on the Argyll island of Luing, where he discovered the possibilities of slate as a material for mosaics. He would ally it with his inherited feel for the rock and ancient buildings of Orkney to create something utterly original.

Dugald MacInnes, a former student of his who became a professional mosaicist, and whose work is rooted in the one-man tradition Garson established, wrote in Adamento, the magazine of the British Association for Modern Mosaic: "Scotland … has, in the 20th century, produced many artists of real worth, but has given birth to precious few who can be instantly recognised as truly and uniquely individual. Arguably Alan Davie, early John Bellany, Philip Reeves and George Garson have this quality. Garson's best work feels, when first experienced, to be almost elemental – primordial – as if somehow, like some of the materials he has used, they have existed for aeons."

Among his best known works are the mural in the foyer of the geology department at Glasgow University, the mural in Grangemouth town centre to a design by Alan Davie, and the Stations of the Cross at St Peter's RC Church in Morningside, Edinburgh.

George Garson was also a fine writer. When he retired from GSA in 1985 he contributed distinctive journalism to the Edinburgh Evening News for several years. He wrote two books – Orkney All the Way Through and No Idle Bread, a vivid series of portraits of West Lothian shale miners. He was a formidable and demanding letter writer – he demanded formidable letters in return.

His poems were published in several literary magazines; his favourite themes were the shipyards and the Pentland Hills. (He was a great walker, adored the Pentlands, but swore he would never set foot in what he saw as the bureaucratic madness of the regional park there, so confined himself to the hills south of Cauldstane Slap. He was not a man to compromise lightly.)

He was widely read and adored English classical music. His heroes in art were Samuel Palmer, Paul Nash and Titian; in music Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett; and the poets AE Housman, Vernon Scannell and the Orcadian George Mackay Brown, who was a close personal friend.

But the people he admired most (and the life he would love to have led), were the anonymous, itinerant stonemasons who built the great medieval cathedrals. He loved Durham and St Magnus in Kirkwall in particular.

He wrote in Orkney All the Way Through: "Few things give me a buzz of expectancy like pushing open a cathedral door. I hold my breath, step into the initial gloom, then sniff candle wax, chrysanthemums, and a hint of damp, and hunch in awe as I adjust to the divine theatricality of stone and glass."

The other rock in his life was his wife, Jean. The homes they established first at The Inch in Edinburgh's southside and then the West Lothian village of East Burnside were warm and hospitable places where the great and the good of Scotland's arts community were accustomed to go.

But after the death of their adopted daughter Jane, then the long illness and death of Jean two years ago, George Garson became fairly reclusive, relying on the visits of a small coterie of friends and the daily charm of a walk to one or other of Broxburn's pubs.

He contracted cancer towards the end of last year and was cared for by another of his former students, Agnes Holden, at her Kirkcudbrightshire family home, and it was there that he died.

JIM CRUMLEY