Analysis: Striking just the right image

Congratulations to Alex Salmond on choosing a really good image for his Christmas card this year and one with some meaning too

It’s the figure of Bella Caledonia by Alastair Gray, adapted by the artist from a detail in his monumental mural decorations for Oran Mor, the music and entertainment centre housed in the former Kelvinside Free Church in Glasgow.

Gray has been decorating the vaulted ceiling there for several years and it now encompasses an iconography as rich and various as any of his novels and a reminder that he was a mural painter before he ever took to writing.

The centrepiece of the ceiling is a reflection on Gauguin’s great picture questioning life itself: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

Bella Caledonia – Beautiful Scotland, is part of Gray’s answer. She is a handsome woman with a glengarry on her head and a thistle in her hand. She looks pretty sure of who she is, no bad thing in this uncertain modern world.

Gray himself said of his personification of Scotland: “The character is a strong woman with an inquiring mind and a sense of social justice, the qualities we would like Scotland to have also.”