Carole Gibbons’s Mother Posed Standing, c.1957

Alasdair Gray was born in 1934 to a working class family in Glasgow. Although trained as a painter, he could not live long practising a single art, and over the course of the last half century has come to be known as a novelist, playwright, academic and poet, as well as an artist. Last year Canongate published A Life in Pictures, a book describing the artist’s life as a draughtsman, muralist and designer. It is an impressive document, cementing Gray’s reputation as a significant and individual figure in post-war Scottish art.