Bel has never operated in a specific style, and there are no powerful influences. She hasn’t felt the burden of needing to earn from painting. She hasn’t used painting as therapy. In fact, painting and drawing have never been challenges, they have been fun, diversions, ways of expressing thoughts, ideas, patterns, and dreaming that would probably otherwise have been lost.

Can they be analysed for hidden meaning? Perhaps. Can we find out about Bel through their content? Perhaps, but she says that maybe we’ll find more about ourselves or others. She claims detachment from her subjects and compositions, and attaches little or no sense of worth to what she’s produced. In our contemporary world’s focus on self-importance, she’s a stranger.

Generously preparing the ground for my visit, there are hundreds of images spread around her airy and bright dining room, where she already has some of her own favourites hanging on the walls. Her sharp-wit and hyper-self-critical judgments are to the fore.

Bel McCoig, The Party Is Over, oil on canvas, c.1995

Bel seems to look at all of these images with a fresh eye. I can see that she’s got an almost innocent fascination in circus figures, flowers, masks, mazes, horses, harlequins, dogs, cake stands, tents, flags. When she sees them today, they bring a delight and sparkle to her life just as they did when they emerged from her brush.

Her paintings are nearly all figurative, based on powerful tools of observation and drawing skills. They amalgamate fantasy and reality, operating in different scales and planes within the same picture.

They can be funny and bizarre and decorative and disturbing. It’s an innocent disturbance, fanciful imagination fixed in posterity by paint and brushes, with flying dogs, regattas amongst clouds (and regattas on swirling carpets), rabbits tumbling out of top hats… Everywhere you look, she’s having fun, so her characters can too.

It’s like entering a circus tent: reality is suspended, gravity can be defied, illusions and magic are the everyday fare. These are not dark places, they are conceits not deceits, the intentions are to amuse and see what happens. Characters and situations appear, often without context. They might relate to each other, they might not. Ambiguity is a constant, and the auteur is free of responsibility. The people and the objects she creates make their own connections, their own relationships – or not. Their places are likely to be determined by quixotic whim, mischievous idea, or spontaneous opportunism, defying the question “Why?” with “because I can”, and always on the look out for exciting harmonies in colours and shapes, despite their logical discords. There’s caprice and play aplenty. Perhaps the pompous will be deflated, perhaps the depression will be lifted, perhaps we might see a different side to the accepted one.

This capricious and playful artist is also one who holds her nerve. Her paintings are mostly based on drawings, often many drawings, and she likes structure, so much so, that when it comes to producing the final painting “I am very controlled. I think almost too controlled at times. Sometimes I change things, but not often”

The circus tents of Laura Knight offer a reference, especially ‘The Last Act” in Dundee and “The Grand Parade: Charivari”, but Bel’s not been back stage, she’s not got to know and paint the performers. Her impressions are innocent of reality. She’s being carried away by the thrill in the front stalls.

Bel says that since she was “so high” and she gestures pretty small, “I loved animals and I liked people, not sitting down, but performing” and she’s always painted circus scenes. She went to Dublin in the 1980’s, with her cousin, Ann Beaton, and they saw  “a lovely circus tent, like a massive upside down basin, with washing lines held up by guy ropes” It was Cirque du Soleil, and Ann persuaded her to go. “I don’t think I moved for two hours.” There are, of course, no animals in Soleil’s show, “If it was my circus, there would be loads of animals.”

Bel’s paintings can also ask you to visit settings that feel like North East Scotland adaptations of nouvelle vague film sets, or theatres where Beckett is on one day and Ayckbourn the next. The director makes something that can appear ordinary, if the viewer wants it to, but can also appear detached from reality and asking existential questions.

Bel McCoig, Ready Now For The Off, watercolour on paper, 1987

Look at ‘Ready Now For The Off”. The harlequin juggler offers his questioning look straight to you. The people with upper halves all cover their eyes, with the exception of a masked man who looks through a slit at you too. They are all wrapped in the same swirl of life, intent and self-confident; the people with lower halves are free to run. What’s happening? The busyness of the enclosed world, people close to each other yet unable to see or relate to what’s around them, the lure of running free. “What does it all mean?” quizzes the juggler: “The mask, the shaded eyes, the runner’s legs, the brown paper bag on the lady’s head…?” The artist has set out her characters and left the scene. Barthes coined the phrase, “Death of the Author” and submitted “Birth of the Reader”.

In amongst these detached conceptions, there’s the personal world of Bel McCoig. She often paints herself, possibly friends and family, certainly dogs, items from her domestic life, the house, the garden, and her fantasies, in what might be seen as a freeform congeries. There may be meaningful associations, but she may not have made them, and if she had, she is not going to make them clear. Every picture is challenging to read. Or not. Perhaps “Ready Now For the Off” is just what you see: a race, a group of contemporary figures, a juggler. Try to work out a meaning and the picture falls apart. See it for its visual impact, made coherent by the swirling curls and curves that envelope all, and it’s a sumptuous and rich multi-layered slice of life.

Across her world, Bel is a Prospero. She can make fantasies into reality. She’s bored with the current order and wants to play.  She’s got mischief in mind rather than absurdity, but she can make a very convincing psychological drama in the mode of Sandy Fraser (it doesn’t matter who was there first). What’s happening? There is drama here, action over there, confusion and mystery everywhere.  Neither the painter nor any of her characters give anything away. There are mannequins and dolls and actors playing roles and real people getting on with activities without referencing the picture making. Even when they’re without mask, dark glasses, or other anonymising effect, they rarely look at you, and when they do, they’re the ringmasters, the questioners, the challengers. ‘What’s the meaning of this?’ they shout, ‘Can you make sense of it?’

Let’s have a go.

There are multiple dream sequences, the rational and the irrational interwoven, but without blurred edges. Everything is crystal clear. Bel can draw detail. Drawing is natural to her. She found it easy as a young girl. In the life school time trials at Art School she had much more down than anyone else when the whistle blew. She’s not turning loose ideas into forms, improvising sophisticated doodles, she knows what she’s setting out to draw and paint.

Bel McCoig, The Remains of the Day, watercolour on paper, 1990

So in “The Remains of the Day” we see in the left foreground an iced cake with red blobs (glace cherries) decorating the top rim, standing on a white plate, which in itself is placed on an unfolded creased white paper.

In the centre of the iced top is a flower vase with small circular holes into which a few decaying carnations are left, one still upright, the rest collapsed; while headless, flowerless stalks turn into wavy ribbon green strands that weave a pattern across the head and upper body of a young woman painted behind the unfolded paper. These loose lines are green, blue, orange and brown, perhaps emblems of seasons or life chapters. Meanwhile, the painting captures the moment when six carnation heads are falling from the flower arrangement, or perhaps have already fallen, depending on which place your eye accepts.  

On the right side of the figure there is more loose or falling plant material – autumnal tree or shrub leaves, seemingly set free from a compartmentalised pattern of leaves separated by wavy ribbon lines, which segue from late to early autumn colours, then through summer to spring green at the top of the painting. Here they intermingle with ferns.

On the left of the spring foliage are two or possibly three headless human torsos, one of whose arms and hands are holding two other arm/hand forms and creating a strong upright that breaks through the curved border of the painting. One of the torsos is headless because a plate with two cup cakes (one upside down) and a knife placed on it, conceals the head. Another plate with two cup cakes, both icing up and cherried, breaks the curved border below the grouping of hands.

On the right in the foreground is a glass jar that probably covers a cake stand, sitting on a hexagonal tile or plate.

Its glass offers two reflections. There is a tree canopy on top and a vista with trees, fields and fencing in the other. The suggestion is that here is a very ordinary reality, reflected behind us. 

Above the jar, leaves from autumn and spring are gathered in wreathes, with a broken wreath in between. Below the wreaths there’s what appears to be a cobbled path or road, and above it is a ragged edge to the paper, a contrast to the curved border on the left.

Behind the figure on the left may or may not be a boat, which may or may not be associated with a rope which forms the left curve of the picture, and appears on the port side to wrap itself serpent-like around a torso’s arm.

Bel McCoig, The Remains of the Day (detail), watercolour on paper, 1990

Bel won’t admit to serious intent, so we might assume that this is surely a tangle of inner thoughts, a grand decorative fancy. But she drew it first! This is not freeform extemporisation. This is a composition thought through, drawn in almost an exact replica of the final version, and then realised in great detail.

Most of the time, Bel shrugs off direct questioning, deflecting, evading. She doesn’t want to explain because there is no explanation.

What do I think? I take a range of approaches and piece together fragments that might or might not be relevant. We must lose the concept of cause and effect.

When Bel moved to postgraduate study at Glasgow School of Art, an invited opportunity at that time, she was allocated a huge studio that she shared with the other top student from that year, Joan Palmer, at the front of the building, immediately above and just to the right of the main entrance.

She was not close to the tall, thin Joan Palmer and lost touch as she progressed to teacher training, getting married and moving to North East Scotland. However, later in life, as a teacher, she started marking school art examinations for the SQA (or their previous incarnation), which involved a short residency in Dalkeith. When she arrived and met her fellow examiners, there was Joan Palmer, also now a teacher. The following year, when she returned, Palmer was not there, Bel enquired after her, to hear that she had died of breast cancer. Would that have a bearing on “Remains of the Day”?

“Joan,” Bel tells me, “was never a close friend.”

“All of these big glass jars and the things inside the bell jars are actually things I saw. I can tell you where I saw them: in a graveyard. I went to Dalkeith to do the Higher marking and I used to wander about at lunchtime, and I ended up in the back of, I think it must have been, a mortuary. I saw these shapes and thought ‘What are these things all wrapped up?’ Well, they were the insides of wreaths, and that’s the basis of these elements in the picture. And then you would introduce elements of what you saw in the graveyard, the thrown away jars, and there always used to be nylon threads. They used to bind them all up in nylon string, and that’s what these are, all the white things are remains of wreaths. I thought it was just a lovely idea. It wasn’t sad. It wasn’t funereal. It was just a joyous thing. So that’s what these are. They sometimes went over into another painting.”

“I just wandered around on my own. I’m quite a solitary person, you know. So I walked about and saw these things and I had a camera and I drew them, and when I drew them I thought ‘ this looks a good idea’ and of course the rainbow speaks of hope to come, and meeting other people so you can tell a big story… “

“The Remains of the Day” could fall into the psychological drama folder in McCoig’s oeuvre, and has links to other pictures, for example, “Cabinet of Reflections”

Bel McCoig, Cabinet of Reflections, watercolour on paper, 1980

In “Cabinet of Reflections”, the painting is again divided into two sections, this time very neatly by Bel, effecting a cupboard or a wardrobe which opens outwards through two doors, via two brass handles and an absent key. The doors are painted vertically to split the picture into two panels, on the left side, female, and images of night and winter; and on the right side, male, with blue skies, rainbows and summer emblems. Here we move towards the psychological drama. On the female side, a featureless woman wearing a large brimmed black hat and sun glasses looks straight at us from a moonlit night, shadows of bare trees on her hat and on the ground behind her. She’s smartly dressed, with wide lapels on her coat and chestnut brown scarf, and her lipstick is bright red. We see her face and upper body, and then below her there are two curved shapes, the first of which contains a separate picture of four silhouettes, possibly suggesting the large female and male characters in the picture alongside two younger looking people: a family? They are standing alongside a bare tree with some low source of light – sunset or moonlight - casting shadows towards us. A four coloured banner – blue, grey, orange, yellow – splits the image in two horizontally, so that legs and shadows are cut from upper bodies.

Below this inset the chestnut brown of the scarf re-emerges to create a sense of warm internal lighting under which we see the bent head of the artist through house plant foliage.

A person in sunglasses and hat appears on a regular basis in her pictures. Does Bel want characters to be anonymous?

“I’m never so definite as that. These are just people. When I look at drawings I sometimes see the resemblance with some people, but it’s never me and I don’t think it’s ever Malcolm (Note 1). I don’t think I appear in many of these at all. That said, it’s maybe more interesting for people to look at them and make up their own mind.”

The rainbow of hope spills out of the cabinet keyhole and forms part of a picture within a picture creating a second half of an oval with the silhouetted family on the left.  A net (or cage) dominates this bright little vista and encloses a person’s head looking out from one of the squares. The rainbow also ties in with two other rainbows on the male side of the picture.  It’s sunshine and showers, in contrast with the winter dark of the female side.

On the right hand panel, a male figure is departing the scene in a black overcoat. There is a cloud shedding rainfall on his back. Here there is a strong parallel with Sandy Fraser, who lived along the road in Muchalls, and whose many psychological dramas feature himself and his family, with him often turning his back and departing the scene. Famously, as in “The Cuckoo Coat” (in Perth), he carries emblematic baggage on his back.

Is there any meaning to this? Is there some thought about Sandy Fraser, or about men and women generally? Women can see things straight ahead, they know the power of family, they can think issues through, while men want to avoid them, escape, constantly looking for the next sunny scene. These are just my reading ruminations and questions. The author has long gone. Prospero puts his characters in place and then leaves them to it, enjoying the ensuing play.

Bel says “I liked Sandy’s manipulation of reality”, so I ask whether that’s what she does too. “I don’t think I can draw quite as well as Sandy could,” she says.

Bel McCoig, Another Day in Lovely Lindos, gouache on paper, 1978

Let’s go back to holidays. There’s a lovely conceit in “Another Day in Lovely Lindos”: a view from behind a pair of sunglasses, presumably in the shade, towards other figures on deck chairs and recliners under umbrellas and out towards the sea. Where the sunglasses would normally darken, they lighten and make clear the sunlit world, and the surround to their shapes are their established dark browns.

Glasses, sunglasses, blindfolds, paper bags over heads… Bel’s ongoing struggles with sight in one eye has perhaps been a constant reference point.

Bel McCoig, The Two Sisters, stone lithograph, 1960.

Isobel Mowat was born and grew up in Gourock in the 1940s and 1950s. She says she was a shy girl and didn’t go out much. Bel’s mother (with her sister at home in 1960 in Bel’s print) was a teacher and her father an engineer who managed to train and qualify as a lawyer in his spare time, while also playing violin in the Greenock Orchestra.  She sailed with her brother at the Royal Gourock Yacht Club, and has a cup for winning the Ladies Race in 1958. She was a natural artist from a very early age, and she decided at that point that she wanted to go to Art School. Her idea was to take ceramics (Note 2) but she was dissuaded when she arrived at Glasgow School of Art and soon found herself under the sway of Alix Dick and Sinclair Thomson in the Drawing and Painting department. Bel learned a lot from Dick: “She really got you to focus on what you were drawing. She asked ‘Are you sure you know what you're seeing. Can you feel it when you're drawing it’?”

She still has folios of her life drawings, which demonstrate a natural ability to observe and make swift, bold, and confident marks. There’s little sense of questioning. Her bodies flow with ease. There are also some wonderful early prints, notably in stone lithograph. Throughout her career, Bel has filled sketchbooks. Such is her compositional capacity and speed of working that page after page look like miniature completed paintings. She tries something out by starting and finishing.  Bel was regarded, by the Head of School, Douglas Percy Bliss, as the best talent in the class, and she won the Director’s Prize in 1961.

Bel McCoig, Life Drawing, charcoal with red conte on paper, c. 1960

Malcolm McCoig was from just down the road in Greenock, but Bel didn’t meet him until they were at GSA.  However, they were quickly a couple and were married in Gourock soon after they graduated. Bel’s father had died when she was 18, so it was her brother who gave her away. A year later, they were in Aberdeen, where Malcolm had got a job at Gray’s School Of Art.

Within a short space of time she was a mother, then a teacher, but she always found time for painting and other artistic crafts (batik, crochet, patchwork, and garden design and management), and her art work progressed quickly – in two key directions: domestic and holiday scenes, with reality in view; and the dramatic fantasies, her main exhibiting tools. The scale got larger and larger, and after winning a competition, climaxed in a sixty feet long painting on the walls of an operating theatre in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary where she created a mural set of idyllic North East rural fantasies, a world of innocent pleasures. Huge canvases in the same vein have had lasting positive impacts for patients at the city’s Cornhill Hospital.

Bel McCoig at home

Apart from these, very few of her paintings are in the public domain, and not many come up at auction. Once you’ve got a Bel McCoig you’ve got something that always makes you wonder, an enchanting image that draws you in, makes you smile, poses questions and never gives you the definitive answer. A constant delight.

Where does she stand in the history of Scottish art? She doesn’t. She’s sitting down, having a wee laugh, and drawing.

Note 1: Malcolm McCoig, Bel’s husband. See a biographical article in art-scot Issue 1.

Note 2: She finally took up ceramics when she and Malcolm moved to Auchenblae, where they were able to build a studio with a kiln, and it’s moved with them to Edzell, where they currently live.