The Silent Weaver (15 page)

Although he and his colleagues extended their catchment area to most of France, several of Dubuffet's most important and original raw artists came from his first post-war hunting grounds in Switzerland. Adolf Wölfli, who made complex images often accompanied by a handwritten explanatory text, like a hallucinatory illustrated medieval manuscript, was a schizophrenic from Bern. Heinrich Anton Müller, whose ‘The fly-man and the snake' became a classic of the genre, and Jules Dou, who recreated through schizophrenic eyes the legend of William Tell, were both from the Swiss canton of Vaud.

In 1971 the Compagnie de l'Art Brut dissolved for the last time. Dubuffet signed an agreement with the city fathers of Lausanne, the capital of the canton of Vaud, which would enable the whole Art Brut collection to be transported there and put on permanent display in the Château de Beaulieu, a gloriously ornate eighteenth-century townhouse which had once been the home of the exiled French writer Madame Germaine de Staël.

The transfer was completed and the Collection de l'Art Brut opened at the Château de Beaulieu in 1976. Lausanne was immediately proud to declare itself ‘the capital of Art Brut (Outsider Art)'.

A year later a 37-year-old Scot, the director of an art centre on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, strolled through the doors of the Château de Beaulieu in Lausanne, looked about with mounting excitement, and wondered . . .

Tom McGrath returned from Switzerland to Glasgow in 1977 and walked back into the Third Eye Centre. He saw there a friend called Joyce Laing, who was a psychiatric art therapist. He approached her. ‘Look,' said McGrath to Laing, ‘I've just come from this Art Brut collection. You work in psychiatry, why don't you have one? If I could get you some money, would you go to the hospitals in Scotland?'

Joyce Laing knew about Jean Dubuffet and Art Brut. She was intrigued. ‘I think I could apply for a sabbatical,' she said. ‘Yeah, we could do it in a year.'

Shortly afterwards they met again at the Third Eye Centre. ‘I've got your money,' said Tom McGrath. ‘I've got your money! I've got you money for a week.'

They drank coffee. ‘Why don't we do it just for fun,' said Joyce Laing. ‘Let's do a circuit of a few of the hospitals and see what we can find in a week.'

Joyce Laing was an alumnus of Aberdeen Art College who, in the early 1960s, became the first psychiatric art therapist in Scotland. In hospitals and sanatoria and clinics on the northeastern shoulder of Britain, she witnessed the extraordinary creative urges of the human spirit when the body and brain are under duress.

‘There were only about 12 of us at art college in the 1950s,' she said, ‘and most went off to teacher training, to become art teachers. But I was quite determined that I was not going to teach. I just didn't like the set-up of schools; the clocking in and clocking out. I was one of the few who intended to starve in a garret!

‘One of my art friends took tuberculosis and was at the Aberdeen hospital, and he kept on painting while he was in hospital, and he got better quite quickly. The doctors by then knew that there was a scheme going for artists to work with tuberculous patients, and they asked him if he would work with other patients and they'd pay him for part-time work.'

Occupational art therapy for tuberculosis sufferers had been pioneered in Britain by an artist called Adrian Hill. While convalescing from tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Sussex in 1938, Hill passed his time sketching in his hospital bed. He recovered quickly, and attributed at least part of his return to health to the therapeutic effects of his art. His doctors agreed, and invited Hill to teach drawing and painting to other patients.

‘My friend did that in the place he was in,' said Joyce Laing,

but he didn't want to extend it when he got home. There were another two hospitals on Deeside and I thought I'd be
better working on that kind of thing. I have a medical family background – my mother was a nurse, I have cousins who are doctors. So I applied to the hospital and said, I'm an artist and I know this scheme now, so would they be interested?

I went to meet them, in about 1957. I went to the Glen O'Dee at Banchory, which had been built in 1900 as the first specialist sanatorium in Scotland. There was a matron in those days, and she showed me round this wonderful building, all glass and wood, designed in the Black Forest style, which was the talk of medicine for tuberculosis. Each floor had outdoor terracing that they pushed the beds out on so the patients got the maximum outdoors, the maximum sun.

They were all men because it was run by the government for anybody who took tuberculosis who'd been in the forces – even if they were from Glasgow or Edinburgh they got sent up there because it specialised. So it was basically young guys, the same age as myself, about 70 of them.

I said hello to one or two of the guys and then – talk about interviews – it was, ‘Okay, you're in!' It was all under the Red Cross, the Red Cross paid me. I had absolute carte blanche. They didn't know anything about art; I didn't know that much about tuberculosis – so it was, ‘Just come in and do what you want to do.'

Those young men were in bed all day, every day, in their twenties! You'd go off your head with boredom. At first they weren't allowed to walk, then they were up for a few hours before being put back to bed. Some weren't even allowed downstairs, depending on their condition. As they convalesced they were allowed down to the dining room, and a games room, and to play croquet on the lawn – it was all an aristocratic type of atmosphere. And they were allowed to go walks in the woods, but not when they were first in. It was very, very rigid, so they were bored out of their minds.

So we got 80 per cent of the population painting. Just because they were so bored. I was amazed by how many patients wanted to paint. I could just give them paper and
pencils – all that was supplied to me. They could paint what they wanted to paint.

As I went round they would chat to me about their painting – I want to paint this picture, or I want to paint my girlfriend, or when I was on holiday. So you got this relationship with them. And if they got very ill you got more worried about them. Sometimes they were segregated in single rooms if they were very ill. Some of them said they didn't want to paint, so you just looked in and said, ‘Hi, how are you?' They would chat a bit and you'd move on to the next one. It worked in a sense.

There was a boy came in, he was 19, a guy from Glasgow. And the ward sister had said, ‘I wish you could get this guy to paint, because he's depressed, and he's very ill, and he's just lying there.'

So I went in once or twice but got very little response, and said, ‘Let's just leave it until he's feeling a bit better.' Then I more or less forgot about him.

And it was a priest who was visiting, came running after me one day and said, ‘You're the artist?' And I said yes. And he said, ‘Will you go in and see John? He wants to see you.' I said sure, of course.

I went in and John said, ‘I want to paint.' You could feel the heat from his body, his temperature rocketing up through tuberculosis. He said, ‘Not a piece of paper, it's got to be canvas.' I said, right. We had canvases – it was amazing the nurses allowed me to use oil paints, it was all over the sheets and things. But nobody complained.

So he said, ‘I want to do a crucifixion.'

I said, ‘Do you want to try it out first?'

‘No, I want you to help. Tell me what to do.'

I did this figure, this Christ figure. So I left him to fill it in, and I came back a couple of days later – I was there twice a week – and he was very, very ill. The sister said to me, ‘This guy is not really able to do anything.'

So I said, ‘I'll put it on your wall so you can look at it, and you can tell me next time what you want me to do next.'

The next week I went in, and the nurse said, ‘Don't go in there. He died last night.'

That was what you were up against.

But when they were particularly ill, the intensity with which they wanted to produce stuff was unbelievable. That's something I was very surprised by. As they got better, it became just ordinary, amateur stuff.

An antibiotic drug called streptomycin ended Joyce Laing's work with tuberculous patients, because streptomycin became the crucial ingredient in the cocktail of drugs which finally cured tuberculosis. ‘A miracle cure,' she said.

You saw the wards begin to go down in numbers, almost overnight.

But in another hospital I went to, all the patients were doctors who had been through the wards and had taken tuberculosis. They were all talking about it when the cure came and beds were emptying, and I was very friendly with men in psychiatry who said, ‘That's where medicine's going – psychiatry.'

That was the 1960s, and I went into psychiatry. Somebody must have told the professor of psychiatry in Aberdeen about my interest. There was enough money to build a new 20-bed clinic as a teaching unit. It was called the Ross Clinic, after a man named Ross who donated the money. It dealt in psychiatry and psychotherapy, but concentrated on psychotherapy – you know, the idea of putting psychotherapy before drugs.

The professor heard that I'd been working with tuberculosis and I'd written a paper called ‘Tuberculous Paintings'. He got hold of the paper, and he phoned me one day and said, ‘Would you be interested in coming and working with us? We're setting up and opening in a couple of weeks' time. I want a team.'

I was edgy about psychiatry – mad people, you know, and I was in my twenties. But he said, ‘Well of course we would train you.' So when I went in, the team was psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors training in psychiatry, nurses training in psychiatric nursing, social workers, all as a team and all working together. Every case that came in was presented and you had to go to every presentation, so you knew the whole history of everybody who came in.

Joyce Laing became art therapist at the Ross Clinic.

I was given a large art studio, absolutely modern, and joiners coming in saying, ‘What do you want?'

I didn't realise the facilities were unusually good. I thought, ‘This is what you do!' Everything you wanted, you got. Every patient that came in was invited to the studio, as part of their treatment.

It was very high-powered, the Ross Clinic, known throughout the world. Doctors who came from there would get a job anywhere after the high quality of their training. And only a few patients per doctor.

The doctors had never seen the visual side of madness. I would say to the nurses, ‘When a patient is brought in, and they're pretty ill' – if they're mad they are sometimes brought in by the police – ‘before anything happens, get them to paint. Never mind injections, just get them to paint!'

The doctors would shrug and say, ‘They have to be treated too!' But that works, because what we were getting then was their depiction of their visual hallucinations. And some of these patients, after they got that much better, just stopped producing art.

There was one who, when he was admitted – I think they had to get the police to take him in, he was just screaming mad – he painted a lot when the nurses put paints in front of him. When he came over to me he was a lot better, the medication was in, you know. They were given medication
and sometimes they got back to normality with it. It didn't last that long, but they'd get over the screaming and shouting and before medication that would have gone on probably forever, on and on and on. But with the medication you get them calming down and they're able to relate, to talk to you normally. And I said to him, ‘I got some of your paintings when you first came in, do you remember painting?'

And he said, ‘Oh, yeees.'

So we took some out, and they're of a head being distorted and pulled apart – images of hell almost, and beautifully painted, he was very skilled. I said, ‘Do you remember doing them?'

And he said, ‘I can remember, that was what I saw. That was absolutely what I saw.'

So the pictures were hallucinations. For the first time. Medicine had never seen this before. With the psychiatrists talking and talking to them they were getting a verbal description. But they weren't seeing. And this guy, who was skilled in painting, was actually producing it visually.

It was then, at the Ross Clinic in the 1960s, that I first heard of l'Art Brut. I came across one of Jean Dubuffet's articles. There was a schizophrenic woman called Antonia Jabloner in one of the big hospitals outside Aberdeen, and she had been there for years and years, and she did embroideries – wow! They were just a knock-out! And I thought, this is Dubuffet, this is what he was talking about. But that was all I was seeing. I wasn't seeing any of the others, anywhere else in Scotland.

In the mid-1970s Joyce Laing was seconded from the Ross Clinic to Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow. The largest jail in Scotland, Barlinnie was celebrated for containing the country's most vicious and unrepentant criminals. In 1973 a Special Unit was established at the prison, with the radical brief of rehabilitating some of those offenders through communication and creativity rather than simply punishing them.