James Watt, Artist

By JamesWatt

Cataloguing the Clyde

A research day today, going back through a catalogue for a previous exhibition, identifying which paintings to focus on with particular classes. All the workshops in June have just about been booked, so the process begins in finding out the context within which classes have decided to take part, and creating the curriculum materials to make what they will be doing as relevant as possible to those contexts.

These pages, with puffers and harbours and docks from an earlier era in Greenock's past, sometimes show a dark town, struggling for light. Another limitation on palette. They were featured in a catalogue for an exhibition at the McLean Gallery in 1995.

The image blipped yesterday will be the frontispiece on the book to accompany the exhibition at the Beacon this June. I like how only a detail has been taken, a part of the story.

Pupils will be looking at parts of the paintings, and telling the narratives there.

I'm looking at the images of the paintings today, researching the background of each one, and imagining a context only suggested.

What do you think? What's the story of the one in the centre on the bottom line?

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