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countryside ringed by open moor. Sheep scutter about the hills, the river cuts through deep chasms, trees offer shelter in deep groves. The village is a gaggle of
curiously tall cottages on each side of a road to nowhere in particular. A friendly place with fewer than one hundred inhabitants, and most of them in those days born in the parish. It got its name from the roofless medieval church which had been the chief Scottish seat of the Knights Templar before that powerful military order was suppressed in 1312. The village kirkyard boasts a gravestone, erected in I847, which bears the entire last will and testament of a local cleric. Temple’s only other claim to fame, is made modestly on a stone set in the front wall of his cottage, saying: ‘Sir William Gillies 1898-1973 lived and worked here.’The cottage offered the family comfortable living accommodation and Gillies a studio and garden. These were valuable bonuses. But if he had written a list of painting subjects which would appeal to him – gently undulating hill country dotted with bonny hamlets, drystane dykes, steep screes, tracts of trees and water, moody skies, and the quaint hugger-mugger of a village street – surely he would have hoped for too much to find them all in one place. Yet there they were on his doorstep.
W. Gordon Smith, 1991
Sir William Gillies was the dominant figure of the Edinburgh School over which both his personality and his work had a quiet authority. He led by example at the College of Art, encouraging his students to experiment but from a firm grounding in looking, and of course practice, drawing in particular. He also selected his staff to reflect this ethos: men and women who had a similar independence but respected hard work, what William MacTaggart called the good habit. The duties of teaching for Gillies and many of his colleagues in the School of Drawing and Painting were combined with their own practice without conflict; being a professional painter: working and exhibiting, was understood as integral to the reputation and health of the School. Robin Philipson, Elizabeth Blackadder, John Houston, David Michie and James Cumming were the beneficiaries of this attitude, along with their students, quietly instilled by Gillies over his fifty years of influence.
I have been trying to pin down my thoughts on the great man. I do not find it easy. In a way he remains an enigma. I was a student for five years while Gillies was Head of Paintings and yet I had only three or four lessons from him in all that time. The first was when MacTaggart called for Bill Gillies to come and see a painting I had done. He admired it generously and commended it for its tonal values. I had on the easel a much more freely painted thing with apples and a jug. He looked at it and said Apples are not tennis balls. They have planes. He then proceeded to push the wet paint around with his horny thumb, making the apples truly three dimensional, and expressed in planes. On another occasion I was propounding a theory I had come across about Organic Colour Values… I asked him if he did not agree with this. His esponse was typically anti-intellectual. No. Nature always gets the colour wrong, so you have to try to improve it.
David McClure, quoted in W.G. Gillies by W. Gordon Smith, Atelier Books, 1991
The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1945, 1949, 1952, 1958 (Festival), 1963 (Festival), 1968, 1971, 1986, 1989, 1991 (Festival), 2011, 2012, 2013, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2023 (Anniversary)
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