Poetic Licence
Paintings of Scottish writers and poets
July 4-October 12
Artist’s statement:
When I was a teenager one of my art college classmates complained to a tutor, “All the important art movements have happened. Everything’s been done.” The tutor said, “They haven’t been done by you.” I guess this made a lasting impression on me.
The idea behind ‘Poetic Licence’ was to take existing images of eminent Scottish writers, lift them out of the age in which they were created and stylistically subvert them, sometimes in not very subtle ways. The intended effect is to jolt you out of any preconceived ideas of time. Why shouldn’t Robert Burns and Liz Lochhead be sitting together in a pub?
Looking at the original oil painting of Sir Walter Scott, young people especially might find it hard to see beyond the 19th century formal wear and the austere old master treatment. Remove these and they might wonder who he is. If that sounds shallow, anything to get young people interested in writers is my defence.
So enjoy being jolted. I’ll stop short of singing ‘My Way’.
About the artist:
Greg Moodie is an artist and writer with an impressively ludicrous CV and a poor recollection of everything on it.
His first novel, ‘Six Degrees Of Stupidity’, was published in 2021 and he threatens to publish its follow-up, ‘The Unbearable Stupidity Of Being’, in 2023.
He also wrote and illustrated ‘Cool Scots’, a psychedelic reimagining of Scotland’s rich past, and ‘Borrowing Burns’, a semi-fictional or “factually dubious” account of the making of his series of Tam O’ Shanter murals in a West Lothian bar.
He has created a weekly comic strip – in collage form – every Monday since 2012, sometimes within the pages of The National, Scotland’s newest daily newspaper, and published three comic compendiums, ‘Greg Moodie Versus The Union’, ‘Election Dissection’ and ‘Striptease’.
Technically Dundonian, Moodie graduated in Fine Art from jute city’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art “sometime before the invention of fire” but believes that, like Vegas, what happened there stayed there.
He currently resides in The Enchanted State of Torphichen (population 570), a conservation village in central Scotland where he won Citizen of the Year in 2016 “for bringing disrepute to the community”.
This is his first exhibition of paintings but he sees no reason why the public shouldn’t suffer more in future. See https://gregmoodie.com/ for more.
The exhibition is free and open to all during the library’s opening hours.
Greg’s books are available in our physical and online shop.