It’s All Writ Out For You: The Life and Work of Scottie Wilson (Hardback)
- Artist: Scottie Wilson
- Published: 1986
- Publisher: Thames & Hudson, London
- Edition: -
- Format: Hardback
- Height: 24cm
- Pages: 104
- Illustrations: 66 illustrations, 48 in colour
£65.00
It’s All Writ Out For You: The Life and Work of Scottie Wilson (Hardback)
'Kierkegaard, Kafka, Connolly, Compton-Burnett, Sartre, "Scottie" Wilson. Who are they? What do they want?' asks a bewildered character in Evely Waugh's The Loved One. Scottie who? He was a Glaswegian Jew, nearly illiterate and fond of the bottle, who knocked about the world for forty years before discovering he could draw. He then created a realm of poetic beauty which was constantly threatened by demons that he called 'Greedies' and 'Evils'. He has been labelled a Surrealist, a Naive, an Outsider, an Innocent. A solitary, introspective man with an utter lack of interest in anybody's art but his own, his pictures wer collected by Picasso. By any reckoning he is one of the most bizarre British artists of the century. George Melly first encountered Scottie Wilson in the 1940s and was fascinated by the man and haunted by his art ever since. This is the most substantial and richly illustrated account of Scottie's career that has yet appeared. 'Life!-it's all writ out for you - the moves you make ...' was one of Scottie's favourite maxims. George Melly has unravelled most of the mysteries surrounding that life and provides a characteristically witty and enthusiastic appreciation of the remarkable pictures that it produced.
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Authors Biography
George Melly, blues singer, had an extraordinarily full and varied career. He sang with Mick Mulligan's Jazz Band in the 1950s and was with with John Chilton's Freewarmers from 1974. He wrote the Flook strip cartoon balloons (drawn by Trog) from 1956 to 1971, was successively pop music, television and film critic for The Observer between 1965 and 1973, and wrote scripts for two films, Smashing Time and Take A Girl You. He was also author of several books on art, including Revolt into Style (1970), Tribe of One: Great Naive and Prinitive Painters of the British Isles (1981) and of three highly acclaimed volumes of autobiography. He collected modern paintings and was an enthusiastic patron of the arts.
