Doors Open

His tutor had only just agreed, scoring him a ‘narrow pass’. The tutor was a big fan of Warhol, so Westie’s next piece had been calculation itself: a stylised Irn-Bru bottle against a custard-yellow background. The mark had been more favourable, sealing (though he couldn’t know it then, of course) Westie’s fate.

He was in his final year now and had almost completed the portfolio for his degree show. It had struck him only recently that there was something odd about the whole notion of a degree show: if you studied politics or philosophy, you didn’t attach your essays to the walls for strangers to read. If you were going to be a vet, you didn’t have the general public watching as you put some poor animal to the knife or stuck your arm up its backside. But every art and design college in the land expected its students to parade their shortcomings to the world. Was it attempted humiliation? Preparation for the harsh realities of life as an artist in twenty-first century philistine Britain? The space for Westie’s showcase had already been allocated – deep in the bowels of the college building on Lauriston Place, next to a sculptor who worked with straw and a ‘video installationist’ whose main claim to fame was a looped stop-motion animation of a slowly lactating breast.

‘I know my place,’ was all Westie had said.

Influenced (retrospectively) by Banksy, and spurred on by his experience with the Warholesque Irn-Bru bottle, Westie’s stock in trade was pastiche. He would copy in minute detail a Constable landscape, say, but then add just the tiniest idiosyncrasy – a crushed beer can or a used condom (almost his signature, according to the other students) or a scrap of wind-tossed rubbish such as a Tesco bag or crisp packet. A Stubbs portrait of a proud stallion might feature a jet fighter in the distant sky. In Westie’s version of Raeburn’s The Reverend Walker Skating, the only perceptible difference was that the man of the cloth now found himself sporting a black eye and stitches to a cut on his left cheek. One of his tutors had gone on at length about ‘anachronism in art’, seeming to think it a good thing, but others had accused him of simple copying – ‘which is by no means the same as art, merely capable draughtsmanship’.

All Westie knew was that he had a marketable-sounding nickname and only a few more weeks to go before the end of term. Which meant he should either be applying for postgraduate places or else looking for gainful employment. But he’d been up half the night working on a graffiti project: stencils of the muffled face of the artist Banksy with the words ‘Money In The Banksy’ and some dollar bills painted above and below. The stencils were anonymous. He was hoping the local media would pick up on the story and make ‘the Scottish Banksy’ a fixture in the public imagination. It hadn’t happened yet. His girlfriend Alice wanted him to become a ‘graphic artist’, meaning comic books. She worked front-of-house at an artsy cinema on Lothian Road and reckoned the way for Westie to become a top Hollywood director was for him to start drawing cartoons. He would then move into promo videos for indie rock bands and from there to the movies. The only problem with this – as he’d pointed out to her several times – was that he had no interest whatsoever in film directing… she was the one who wanted it.

‘But you’re the one with the talent,’ she’d responded, stamping a foot. That gesture said quite a lot about Alice – an only child raised by doting middle-class parents who had praised her in everything she’d ever attempted. Piano lessons were going to turn her into the Vanessa Mae of the keyboard; her songwriting would see her sharing a stage with Joni Mitchell or at the very least K.T. Tunstall. She’d thought herself a prodigy as a painter, until her teacher at the fee-paying high school put her right. Having dropped out of university (Film and Media Studies with Creative Writing), she was pi

Cretins.

Another time, he’d told Alice about a screen academy that was setting up in the city – she could do it part-time, learning all about film-making. Her excitement had lasted until a trawl of the internet had revealed the potential financial outlay.

‘Mummy and Daddy will be happy to pay,’ Westie had suggested, and she’d blown up at him, accusing him of accusing her of being a leech, of bleeding her poor parents dry. Another stamp of the foot and she’d bounded out of the room, slamming the door after her and causing one of his drying canvases to fall from its easel on to the floor. He’d managed to calm her down eventually with tea and a cuddle in the flat’s cramped kitchen.

‘I only need to work for another ten years and I’ll have savings enough,’ she had sniffled.

‘Maybe I can bump up my prices at the degree show,’ Westie had offered. But they both knew this wasn’t exactly feasible – he was probably going to sell next to nothing. No matter how good his draughtsmanship, in terms of actual artistry he was still that same ‘narrow pass’, at least in the eyes of the people whose marks counted most. The head of department – old Prof Gissing – had never been a fan. Westie had looked up Gissing himself once and had found that the grumpy old sod had pretty well stopped painting in the 1970s, meaning all he’d done these past thirty years was write articles and give boring lectures. Yet people like him, they were the ones who’d give the thumbs-up or thumbs-down to Westie’s whole future as an artist. Westie, the son of a postman and a shop assistant, sometimes felt that there was a conspiracy afoot to stop the lower orders being recognised as any sort of creative force.

Having finished the joint, Westie, arms folded, took a stroll around the room. Alice didn’t come in here very much any more. She stuck to the kitchen and bedroom. The mess irritated her, yet she was reluctant to tidy up in case it interfered with his creativity. She’d explained about a poet she’d been friendly with at college whose flatmates had done this big spring-clean of his bedroom one time and surprised him with it. He’d tried to be grateful but hadn’t been able to write poetry in there for weeks afterwards. Westie had considered this, then had asked just exactly how ‘friendly’ the two had been.

Cue another lovers’ tiff.

When the doorbell sounded, he realised he’d been practically asleep, staring out of the window at the passing traffic for at least a few minutes. Bed was one answer, but Alice would be expecting him to have achieved something with the day. The doorbell rang again and he considered who it might be. Did he owe money? Would Alice’s parents want a quiet word, maybe slip him a few quid to clear out? Someone rattling a tin for charity or needing to know his political leanings? Last thing he needed in his life were these constant interruptions. He was meant to be working… putting the finishing touches… surfing the junkyards and bric-a-brac merchants for cheap gilt frames into which to place his Stubbs, his Constable, his Raeburn…

Instead of which, he found himself opening the door to one of those people whose marks counted most: Professor Robert Gissing, in the flesh, and apologising for the intrusion.

‘Looked for you in the studios, and then in your allocated exhibition space…’

‘I keep most of my paintings here, tend to work on them at night.’