Interview: George Wyllie’s daughter on her father’s impact on Scottish art

In a year of events celebrating George Wyllie’s art, Moira Jeffrey meets his daughter, and finds a house full of quizzical reminders of the mark he left on the art world

In a year of events celebrating George Wyllie’s art, Moira Jeffrey meets his daughter, and finds a house full of quizzical reminders of the mark he left on the art world

WHEN I drive down to Gourock to meet Louise Wyllie, daughter of the late artist George, the Clyde is cloaked in a thick haar that makes it all but invisible. But as I climb the hill to the house George used to describe as his “eyrie,” the sky clears, the estuary ­unfolds before me and it becomes ­apparent why he loved the place so much.

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It was here that George Ralston Wyllie, a former Navy man who worked for the Customs and Excise, an excellent double bass player and a dab hand at making everything from bogies to children’s dancing costumes, became George Wyllie the self-taught artist responsible for some of Scotland’s most memorable sculptures and public artworks including the Straw Locomotive and The Paper Boat.

Louise Wyllie is putting the finishing touches to a posthumous retrospective of his work at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, which will open next month. It will include 250 works of art: sculptures and drawings and surviving props from his play A Day Down A Goldmine.

Louise, now in her sixties, was a teenager when she realised that her father’s life would never be quite the same again. “I was at the awkward age when you didn’t want to do anything with your parents and my ­father said to me there was a thing at [artist] Dawson Murray’s house with some artists... I’ll never forget it – it marked me for life.”

The artists were talking about surrealism and playing a surrealist game. “I lost it completely,” she laughs. ­“After years of being told by a fairly strict father to be quiet and polite in adult company, in a strict 1950s way, I now had to shout out loud. I knew things were never going to be the same after that. He was a good dad, but suddenly art consumed his whole life.”

George Wyllie died, at the age of 90, on 15 May this year. Louise is back in her childhood home, supervising the final preparations for the show. Wyllie moved to Gourock in 1954 with his wife Daphne and his daughters Louise and Elaine. “My father bought this house as a shell,” explains Louise as I perch on a sofa. “They were hard-up at the time so he said to the builder ‘I’ll lay the floors’. I ­remember he made the fireplace.” She indicates the ­cement and pebble structure that is still standing. “It was all they could do to afford it at the time.”

She shows me an early painting of herself and her sister as children. Her father made the chair they are sitting in. “He gave us our haircuts too.”

In Gourock, George learned to weld and to watch the clock. “He was doing art and working in the Customs,” explains Louise, “but from up here he could watch the ships coming up the river and time it. He knew when they would arrive. He would have a mattress up there and kip down so he could be free to work on his art up here.”

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I ask her what she thinks drove her father? She says he had a practical energy she herself has inherited from him: “A motor, I think – my grandmother had it too.” She recalls a man who was a “compulsive reader”, and “good with his hands – surgeon’s hands my grandma used to say.” But he also had an incredible imagination. “I was talking to him once about a red carpet and he said, ‘What flavour is it?’ And I thought, that’s just how it is.”

He cared about the sea, felt passionate about the environment, but his politics were not party politics, “but what he felt in his soul.”

Home life was unusual to say the least. “You’d bring a boyfriend back and my dad would be wearing a string vest, holes in his socks from welding, and there’d be a giant knife and fork on the wall.”

Her mother Daphne, Louise says, kept the equilibrium of the family. Daphne died in 2004. “Nothing was the same after she died,” says Louise. I recall a heartbroken George used to say the same thing too. “She made sure this was still a home.”

Both her parents were strong-minded, she recalls. The living room used to have two sets of curtains on its two windows: one chosen by her mother, one by her father – neither would give in.

It was this determination that saw George meet his mentor, the artist Joseph Beuys, work with artists such as the sculptor George Rickey, show in New York and keep working and exhibiting even in his eighties.

In 2010, suffering from a rare form of dementia, George Wyllie entered a home. It was then that Louise and her sister Elaine Aitken conceived a plan to stimulate him, which “grew legs” and became a year-long festival to ­celebrate his legacy.

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In 2011 they set up the Friends of George Wyllie and in 2012 launched the Whysman Festival, to use Wyllie’s ideas in projects with schoolchildren and former industrial workers. The retrospective seemed a natural thing to do. “In a funny sort of way, knowing it was happening, he felt he didn’t have so much to do anymore and that was it: off he went.”

Wyllie always placed the question mark at the heart of his work, which he used to call Scul?ture. What does Louise think made him special as an artist? “I think it was the ability to see things in almost a childlike way. He never would think about age, he was a boy really.” Her voice softens. “He didn’t look like a boy, but he was a boy at heart. He could still see fun.”

On my drive home I can see the coloured question mark sculptures that cling to the shores of Inverclyde like exotic wading birds. They have been made as part of the Whysman Festival. In Wyllie’s workshop in Gourock I had seen the following words scrawled in his hand in red chalk on a metal roof beam, “A man is as weary as his ideas.” George Wyllie moved on in May this year, but thanks to his daughters, his questions are with us still. «

• George Wyllie, In Pursuit Of The Question Mark is at the Mitchell, Glasgow, 3 November until 2 February. www.georgewyllie.com

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