Anda Paterson (1935-2022) was an important presence in Scotland’s cultural landscape for some 70 years. As an artist, she stood apart from her contemporaries and predecessors: her images of beggars, peasants and outcasts flew in the face of the polite “drawing-room-picture” tradition, so deeply rooted in our visual culture. Perhaps most strikingly, Anda’s distinctive style cannot be aligned to any specific Scottish or British influence. As an “administrator”, she encouraged a unified, cooperative, artist-led approach to promotion: she co-founded the Glasgow Group and played a key role in its success for some fifty years. The Scottish art scene is a poorer place following Anda’s death earlier this year at the age of 87, but she leaves a remarkable legacy.

Anda Carolyn Paterson was born in Glasgow on 2 February 1935. Surrounded by older relatives who hailed from the Highlands, England and across Europe from early childhood, Anda developed a strong respect for the elderly and an enthusiasm for the richness of life and all the ways it is lived. It is therefore no surprise that her elderly relatives became her favourite early subjects - her first painting was a portrait of her grandfather, by then in his nineties – and that these same subjects became the sources of great inspiration throughout her long creative life. Anda’s Victorian relatives did not always approve of her passionate early interest in art but, by the 1950s, when she saw the open air exhibitions which appeared on the railings of the Botanic Gardens, opposite her home in the city’s West End, she could not be dissuaded from devoting herself totally to art.

As a figurative painter and an exceptionally gifted draughtswoman working in a period when such talents are quite unfashionable, Anda was in many ways an artist who went against the grain. While a schoolgirl at the Glasgow High School for Girls, she disagreed with her art teachers, who pressed her to paint polite still lifes. At the Glasgow School of Art, where Anda studied Drawing and Painting from 1952 to 1958, she sometimes clashed with her teacher, the eminent colourist David Donaldson, because of her commitment to a linear approach. She became particularly close to her teachers Mary Armour and Benno Schotz, however, who happily let her paint the elderly figures she felt so drawn to. But one of the great fascinations of Anda’s work is that it is not indebted to any discernible Scottish or indeed British influence: even as a young woman, Anda stood apart.

Mother And Child - 1978  - image courtesy of  Judith Anna Spence

At art school, some of Anda’s male contemporaries had been inclined to dismiss her as “just another girl” from the High School; until they saw her work, that is, Anda would remember with a chuckle! Figural studies and landscapes from this time, built on a solid foundation of observation and documentation, show that Anda was confidently developing a highly distinctive style. Her figural studies in particular yield lasting pleasure but pack an emotive punch. Anda’s talent was rewarded when she received a prize for her painting of the Marriage at Cana, and in 1956 she secured a stay at Hospitalfield, the residential art school in Arbroath. A highly commended Post Diploma scholarship followed in 1957.

In 1958, along with their close friend, the late James Morrison, Anda and her art school contemporary and lifelong partner James (Jim) Spence founded the Glasgow Group. An ambitious artist’s cooperative which showcased the work of a new generation, the Group was born out of frustration of the lack of exhibiting opportunities in Glasgow. The trio invited nine of their contemporaries – Douglas Abercrombie, Marjory Clinton, Alan Fletcher, Carole Gibbons, Alasdair Gray, Ewan McAslan, Ian McCulloch, Jack Knox and James Watt - to show work with them in Glasgow’s McLellan Galleries. Critical and commercial success meant that the annual exhibitions of the Glasgow Group soon became a key part of the Scottish art calendar. As the decades passed, talented emerging artists were welcomed into the group and greatly benefitted from the support offered by Anda, Jim and their friends. Anda contributed to every Glasgow Group show from 1958 to 1998.

Anda also won acclaim for her work in a number of solo exhibitions: over the course of her career, she staged successful one-woman shows at Strathclyde University, the Lillie Art Gallery and the Compass Gallery, to name but a few. She made innumerable contributions to group exhibitions, and notably to important shows with the National Gallery of Canada and Fundacion Alzante, Bilbao.

Iberian themes often unite the works across exhibitions. Anda delighted in the colours and quality of light in Spain and Portugal, which are reflected in the scarlets, cobalts and umbers which saturate the canvas or paper and invest her mature work with great vibrancy and wonderfully rich textures. The influence of masters from across Europe like Goya, Egon Schiele and Käthe Kollwitz are plain to see in her body of work, particularly in her drawings and etchings. Whether robust or delicate, depicting the heaviness of a peasant’s arthritic hands or the sprightliness of a horse breaking into a canter, the quality of the line in her best works is truly exquisite.

Anda’s desire to depict ordinary, “unexceptional” people with sympathy and sincerity was always greater than her eagerness to simply draw on the styles of the artists she admired. She took great pleasure in engaging fully with her subjects while she drew or painted them, listening to the stories they could tell of their lives, and commenting that by painting a person, one can remember everything about them. A glance at the work which Anda contributed to annual exhibitions at the Royal Scottish Academy over the years reveal her enduring respect for the lives of others, especially those whose experiences are so often glossed over: even the titles of works such as “Victims of War”, “Prisoners”, “Dole Queue” and “Aged Poor” speak for themselves. Although sometimes unsettling, Anda’s work also celebrates the idiosyncrasies of the characters she met and pokes fun at human relationships. She put it succinctly in saying that she depicts “the messy untidiness of human life, [which is] on one hand ridiculous and comic, on the other, struggling, anxious and tragic”. She was directly engaged in exploring the human condition.

Anda Paterson, late 1980’s -picture by Robert Burns

Anda’s reluctance to accept a job at Gordonstoun, Scotland’s pre-eminent public school, is a reflection of her admiration for anyone and everything “down to earth”. She balanced her freelance practice with full-time teaching roles at state schools in the west of Scotland such as Hyndland School, Dumbarton Academy and Jordanhill College School. Anda gained a reputation as a serious educator with a genuine desire to develop the artistic potential of her pupils by placing emphasis on the traditional techniques which she cherished. One of her ex-pupils, the Turner Prize-winning artist Douglas Gordon, recently recalled Anda as one of the most encouraging and empathetic people he has ever met. Anda’s gift of books on Duchamp and Warhol were instrumental in shaping Douglas’s developing interest in art. The fact that she would rather have pupils like Douglas look towards Daumier or Millet meant little, ultimately: she recognised the importance of these great twentieth century artists, and of stoking the flame in her pupils.

Anda continued to paint, draw and etch long after her retirement from full-time teaching, contributing to exhibitions until only a year or two before her death. The home in Cardross which she shared with her loving husband Jim and where she raised her two children, Judith Anna and Paul, reflected her greatest passions: its walls near-groaning with work by some of her many artist friends, or lined with shelves of books which laid bare her lifelong love of learning, or quivering with the sound of classical music, played at full-blast. A tall, charming and strikingly glamorous woman with a memorable bohemian air, Anda cut a distinctive figure around Cardross. She commented, however, that “with irony and poetic justice, I am rapidly developing a strong resemblance to my drawings of vulnerable and time-worn people”.

Anda Paterson RSW RGI PAI died of a brain haemorrhage at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, Paisley, on 18 May 2022, aged 87. She is survived by her children, Judith Anna and Paul, her husband Jim having predeceased her in 2016.

Douglas Erskine