Scottie's World

"Kierkegaard, Kafka, Connolly, Compton-Burnett, Sartre, 'Scottie' Wilson. Who are they? What do they want?" The speaker, a blimpish Hollywood Britisher in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, sucked petulantly on his whisky & soda and stared at his outdated copy of Horizon, Cyril Connolly's British monthly for intellectuals. If he had lived long enough to investigate the matter, he might have wondered how Scottie Wilson, a half-educated furniture dealer turned artist, had ever made his list of the big guns in the 20th Century highbrow arsenal in the first place.

London gallerygoers last week had only to look at 27 of Wilson's latest drawings to see that he was not a complicated intellectual howitzer but something considerably easier to take: a self-taught artist who had a fresh way of seeing things and a gift for getting them down on paper. Scottie's world was a cheerful place where everything fell into intricate designs of delicately colored ink. Strange and luxuriant plants spread across his drawings with the spontaneous elaboration of a Persian carpet; forms, half-vegetable, half-animal, grew out of each other like coral in a submarine grotto; funny little birds, fish and gargoyles were as minutely detailed as fingerprints.

Friendly, 59-year-old Scottie, with a nose as bulbous as one of his own gnomish ink faces, had been scratching pictures to amuse himself ever since he was a boy in the slums of Glasgow. After he moved to Canada 19 years ago to run a secondhand furniture shop, he found that he could attract customers by drawing in the window. One day Scottie's drawing attracted Bookbinder Douglas Duncan, who bought his pictures, helped arrange a one-man show in Toronto. By 1946 Scottie had moved on to London, become a hero to Horizon. Critics hailed him as "one of the most pronounced artistic personalities in London," found in him "the magic of simplicity."

Last week Scottie was scratching away at his drawings full-time in a cheap rented room in the Kilburn district of London. Despite his vogue with London's intelligentsia, his tastes were still simple, his prices low (-L-5 to -L-15 a picture). Some days he worked over his board as many as 15 hours, turned out pictures in two days. Afternoons at 4, however, he took time off to have tea with his landlady's cat.

What did Scottie Wilson want? He gave a simpler answer than any vouchsafed by the Kafkas and Sartres. Burred Scottie: "I don't mind as long as I've got enough money for a few cigarettes and me kippers. Money doesn't matter to me. The only reason I'd like to have any is so that I could make people happy. I'd like to give my pictures away to people who really like them."

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