Marshall’s paintings have an ease with that industrial landscape because it’s his own. He has lived in Lochgelly all of his life. He knows how the mechanics work, or worked.  His father taught him to observe and understand at an early age. The decay, the rotting, the peeling, the rusting and weathering has happened all around him. He’s come to love the post-industrial world as much as he loved the industrial one – chemically altered, textured surfaces; patinas of new colour in the ageing; the stripping of one layer of paint to reveal another; new life in vegetal growth. He observes, understands, and paints.

James Marshall Dickson Interior Carnforth (courtesy of Fife Cultural Trust on behalf of Fife Council)

I ask him if he knows any other artists who have understood Scotland’s industrial world. ‘Muirhead Bone’ is an instant response, ‘And you might know the work by Stanley Spencer, who worked in Scotland as a war artist.  He did a lot of paintings, many of them containing human figures, but bits of machinery… Tom McKendrick. I’ve got one of his submarines in the house…. He would look at an image in the same way as I do. I very often say, ’look at some of my paintings with a magnifying glass, just look into areas and look at what’s going on there. Never mind what it is about, look at that bit, that bit, and that bit, and you’ll be amazed….Great! ….He would take a part of one section and a part of another section, and that would become a Tom McKendrick painting. Purely abstract. I have never quite done that. I don’t know why. A wee bit of reluctance inside me, hanging on from a childhood that says it must look like something. The thing about Tom McKendrick’s work is that however abstract, there is a reference to the actual object that still comes through.”

Marshall is a bit older than McKendrick. He was born in 1942 in Lochgelly. His father was a bus driver who studied engineering drawing. His grandfather, an agricultural engineer who left Lochgelly for Brora in Sutherland, painted in his spare time. Young Marshall just couldn’t stop drawing from an early age, often in “odd places you were never supposed to put marks”.

James Marshall Dickson as a child

Was accuracy important? “Yes. This comes back to my father, because I did my wee drawings of a steam engine and he would look at it and, having an engineering knowledge, would comment and say ‘that’s not how that goes, that’s not how that works, it’s got to be this way’…”

‘Those were the days when the family went for a walk on a Sunday afternoon, if it was a nice day. You always ended up beside the railway line or one of the pits, and on Sunday there’s nothing working, so you got to walk all around, and your father would point things out and say ’see that, do you know how that works?’ …so I was learning some basic mechanical engineering.”

Marshall attended primary school in Lochgelly and then Beath High School, where he was taught art by Bill Duncan and Davie Blair. Leonard Gray arrived to teach at the School when he was in fourth year. Drawing with pen and ink was his thing at school, but art wasn’t his vocation. It was Duncan who pointed him in the direction of art college and the opportunity for teaching jobs as an outcome.

Attending Edinburgh College Of Art from 1960-1964, Marshall’s first two years were spent in the Drawing and Painting department (where, of course, Robin Philipson and William Gillies were the senior staff). It wasn’t the inspirational environment that others found. He liked drawing but received no formal teaching. In fact, he never saw any teachers painting or drawing. He found composition difficult, and was more attracted by the firmer structure in Design, so he switched in third year and flourished.

He was taught calligraphy by Stuart Barrie (husband of Mardi Barrie), and this became a key interest. Importantly, from a picture-making perspective, he learned photographic skills. “There were dark rooms in the college, we got to use old-fashioned half-plate, photo-plate cameras, and take photographs about the studio or sometimes outside. It was never dictated to you what you were going to take photographs of, apart from a wee session where we had to do some portraiture, how to set up lights and the likes of that, but that was just a small element of it. At first, I thought it was not what I wanted to do, ‘I should be drawing things, not photographing things’, but I found it kind of absorbing and I could see the potential in it, so I just took to photography, and found out people were asking me to take photographs for them.”

“Life is full of little happenstances. As students we were sent out to go to different establishments, make yourself known, find out what they do, and they may give you some design work, and one of the places I went to was MacDougalls, the educational people in Edinburgh. ‘Go down there, speak to them, see what transpires’. I went there and found the guy who was running the place, a guy called, I think, Frank Christie, his name was Christie anyway, lived locally, and he said ‘Oh! You had some sketches of some of the old railway bits in Edinburgh, Dalry Road station or whatever…We’re doing a series of books and one of them is going to be about the suburban railways of Edinburgh, would you be interested in doing some illustrations?’ I said yes. As it turned out, MacDougall was taken over shortly after that and the books that they had proposed never materialised, but I’d built up a portfolio of photographs, which were useful when I started to do paintings.

James Marshall Dickson View through the Cylinder ( courtesy of Fife Cultural Trust on behalf of Fife Council)

There was also a time bomb ticking on the railways and the steam age. “There were hundreds of photographs taken, from basically 1963 or 1964. The ones that are up on the walls (of Lochgelly Centre) date from about ‘65 or ‘66. All these steam engine elements, that was all being phased out, it was all about to go, all decaying. So you either get a photograph or a drawing or something of it right then, or you didn’t get it at all.”

View Through the Cylinder was a photograph that became a painting. The contrasts between the immediacy of the operationally clean cylinder, the grimy mix of oil, coal dust, and grease on the wheels, and the fabulously controlled, seemingly endless perspective, work in both modes.

James Marshall Dickson at Lostock, 1966

In the mid-60s would Marshall have regarded himself as a photographer rather than an artist?

“Half and half, I would say. You’ve done artwork at college. You’ve done art and you’ve got your diploma, so, yes, you are to a degree an artist, but you have a leaning towards photography.”

After graduation from ECA, he didn't fancy the lifestyle of a commercial designer - too much evening and weekend work, to tight deadlines - so he decided on teaching. After a short period as a peripatetic in primary and secondary schools in the Lochgelly/Cowdenbeath area, he managed to get a post at Ballingry Junior High School, where he came into the orbit of David Lockhart, who was head of department there.

During this period, Lockhart was instrumental in re-convening the Fife Art Teachers Exhibition in Kirkcaldy, and in 1968 this was a spur to get Marshall drawing and painting again. He submitted an ink-wash, a piece of calligraphy, and a watercolour to the original exhibition. The exhibition was reviewed by The Scotsman’s Edward Gage who specially noted Marshall's watercolour.

That response emboldened a novice. “With that first painting, my heart was in my mouth, and I thought ‘this is not an avant garde art college painting, this is just me doing something I like doing, my way, and you took to it’. That’s where it started. You know, you’ve got something there, get on with it. Don’t try and change it to being somebody else. Over the first four or five years I was painting, though not being prolific, you began to feel ‘I think I’ve got something going here’, and other people seemed to think I’ve got something going there. But, I would never feel I’ve done a wonderful masterpiece!”

James Marshall Dickson Abandoned Boat ( courtesy of the artist)

The subject matter was fixed from the start. Industrial landscapes, railways, boats. “I’m interested in surfaces. I’m interested in textures.  And old buildings, partly derelict buildings, parts of the waterside of the River Clyde in Glasgow before they tidied it up... Themes like that appealed to me quite a lot. I used to go down to Burntisland harbour and used to take photographs of part of the hull of a boat sitting in the harbour. If you can imagine going into a harbour and having a look at that little bit of a beached boat and making photographs based purely on that, not taking the whole thing, then I was doing that sort of thing.”

Looking at Abandoned Boat you can see on first appearance the trademark qualities of a Marshall Dickson painting.  There is no question about what it is: an old fishing boat. The detail is all there, the patched hull, the insignia, the trawling apparatus, the firm prow, the stark superstructure, all well-drawn and proportioned. It’s clear that the artist is focused on the portrait – having the hull exposed out of the sea is an attraction – and there is no distraction in the backdrop, just a murky brown with a few patches of mottled darker brown to add a little texture. It’s a stark, lifeless examination. But then, as you close in on different sections, the vitality is everywhere, and it all stems from decay. Details are lost in abstract watery colour schemes where wet-on-wet application and multiple layering creates the effect, with each component element contributing often through association with others, rather than through its own intrinsic quality. It’s a patchwork of colour chemistries.

Picking out a couple of sections for closer consideration, look at the nameplate and the upper prow.

“Regulus” is my guess, and Marshall had no reason to obfuscate. His plan suggests that the top of the lettering that he saw was lost to a horizontal distress that starts to the left of the nameplate and affects all of it – some form of scrape that relates to the one that obscures the BK73 (a boat from Berwick On Tweed) registration. We have to imagine the nameplate was originally black lettering on a red background, with some form of cream border, or perhaps the boat’s colour scheme had changed over its lifetime.  The colours at play in Marshall’s palette here are black, tile red, a rose pink, an oat or straw yellow, a soft hazelnut, and white. There is almost nowhere where a single mark has been made where the pure colour can be identified. Each dab load fuses with the underlying pigment on the surface. It’s likely that a warm straw coloured wash underpins it all, but even where black pigment defines the lettering and the frame of the plate, its multi-layered gradations of dilution are set up by brush strokes and paint-loading that was always seeking seepage and fuzziness.

On the prow, there’s no strong red or pink, and blues and greys are the contrast with straw and buff, with verditter seeping over from the hull; but Marshall’s romantic attachment with wrecks means that watery pinks and purples add to the cheery character. The detailed examination gives little clue to the overall impact – taken in isolation, one might question what this assemblage could denote – but here is Marshall’s skill. He knows how to present distress to surfaces, whether natural fading or weathering, or caused by human abuse or accident, without detailing the peeling, the rusting, or the accretions. This means that he’s able to offer a wide range of textures and colour harmonies in a picture without losing the main impact of the subject matter. The subtlety of his work at close quarters creates the effects that give the painting its character, and never distract or detract from the whole.

It was David Lockhart who kept the pressure on Marshall in the early days. “He saw the work, thought it was worthwhile, suggested that I keep painting and submitting to exhibitions, such as the RSW, and get known, get hung. He then said to me ‘How would I like to be proposed as a member?’ “ Marshall describes the review process: “There were twelve candidates considered at the AGM, each of whom took five paintings in, which were just put on the floor round this large room. There’d maybe be about forty members who were told ‘They’re the candidates. Write down who you wish to consider for membership’. I was number two and two were elected.” So, he was a member in 1973.

The RSW has been his natural exhibiting home ever since. “I haven’t gone all round Britain looking for shows. I was quite happy to do a few paintings, half a dozen paintings or so, to go to the RSW. And occasionally you’d be invited to do other exhibitions in other places, but the RSW was the main place for me.”

Marshall’s photographic portfolio was always a source of ideas, but he’s always seen it as a tool to be used alongside observation and drawing. He still sees enormous value in drawing and sketching, in fact for him, you can’t beat sketchbooks: “Part of the business about sketching is you’re always moving, things are moving, so you see things from different angles, so you’re getting a lot of information, whereas a camera sees one angle and that’s it. So you get kind of stuck in a wee groove if you do that.”

James Marshall Dickson Lock Gates Composition

It’s hard to imagine that the source of the information for Lock Gates Composition was a camera. Two steam engines on a bridge over a canal would be a picture that Marshall would dream of, and surely dreamed up. The first thing that the eye is drawn to in this picture is not the industrial landscape, the structures or the machinery on show, despite these being the main subjects, but the depth of perspective and the wonderful sense of last light on the horizon that the artist achieves in the little ‘picture within a picture’ under the second bridge.  This hint of luminescence in an image that is otherwise laden with gloom, darkness and negligence is a very tiny illusion of hope in a world where human industry challenges human aesthetics and corners nature into thriving on weed.

Marshall sees beauty in machinery and he can be thrilled by functional forms. He thinks that art (and society) has skewed aesthetic bias towards countryside:  “I don’t know what the psychologist would make of all of this. The British landscape has wonderful rivers, mountains and glens. It also had an industrial landscape at one time, with this rich patina of industrial buildings, old machinery, whatever, and that’s all gone and it’s been replaced by what people call a grass desert. Grass is not of interest. Remember the fun of going on a journey in the train, as well as seeing the nicest scenery on the way, it was that moment when you came to an industrial conurbation like the outskirts of Glasgow or Edinburgh, with all these fascinating chimneys…”

In Lock Gates Composition, the sky is very dark, with the belching coal smoke from the steam engine contributing. Marshall celebrates the engines, placing them in their natural habitat and emphasising the dirty world they inhabited. The bright light in the foreground and the verdant growth on the embankment highlights this, with strong support from Marshall’s warmly lit stone bridge wall.  The molecular analysis reveals the chemical components and their colour interactions and myriad variegations on absorption. There’s hardly a firm colour fix in the entire picture, even in the dark sky where layers of diluted black have settled into a stilled fog, rather than a wash.

It’s relatively late in the day to discuss steam engines, but Lock Gates Composition offers a good introduction. Marshall’s life has been defined by his love for them. In the 1960s he made the train journeys that took him all over the UK, nearly always to industrial conurbations, to experience the last of the steam engine age.  The picture (above) of Marshall in Lostock, was taken in 1966, when he was 24. The final engine was retired in Britain in 1968. Marshall and his camera travelled and captured a lot of images, including many logged in the mind.  These images were not the Flying Scotsman barreling through the English countryside, or a locomotive pulling up at a tranquil country station, or pressing through snow drifts in the Highlands. They were images of working engines, coated with dirt and grease, shunting, pulling, moving heavy stuff, and then they were the disused and neglected, sitting in obscure yards and sheds, well known to enthusiasts, but otherwise ignored, left to rot.

Marshall has no interest in picture-postcard images, pristine illustrations, and even transport museums with their polished cabs and glistening brasses. He loves the nuts and bolts, and if he’s going to portray them in a painting, they’re going to be in the environment that he also loved but which is lost today: the Britain of the industrial age.

Around the time that real steam engines disappeared from active life on the railways, Marshall decided he would like one of his own. He decided to make a steam engine. His father, as we know, had introduced him to the fundamentals of mechanical engineering, and he went to evening classes at Fife College to learn the engineering skills he would need to build a model engine. By 1972 he had finished. He’s currently got three of them in his house. They’re big enough and strong enough to be able to carry 12 adults on a track. The mechanism is identical to the full size one. It tells you something about Marshall’s character, patience, and commitment. “You would do a painting in anything from two or three days to two or three weeks, whereas these things go on for two or three years.”

James Marshall Dickson with his steam engine

Is there another Scottish artist who has observed, understood and painted steam engines with such affection, and with such artistic honesty; true to making art and true to the mechanics of the machine? It’s a limited field, and that makes it easier to claim Marshall Dickson as probably the finest. There are many railway artists. In fact, there is a Guild of Railway Artists, but check them out. Look at the difference between the work of one of the great “railway artists”, David Shepherd, and Marshall. Shepherd’s mastery of illustrating the steam world is widely acknowledged, and Marshall would not wish comparison. His preference is art rather than illustration. Perhaps its better to say Lock Gates Composition is a work of art that features steam engines. They’re not showing off and gleaming, they’re just a working part of the image.

Marshall knows there’s often fine lines that define art, but he knows where they are for himself: “at times you would do things as wee fillers, pot boilers… a wee painting you knew they would probably sell. They were reasonable paintings, but they were not stuff you would want to put in to the RSW.  You would really want something better than that. It’s very difficult to judge exactly where the difference lies. It’s just a feeling you have. Something is just too illustrative or it’s too much this way, too much another way.”

After thirteen years as a teacher – most of the time following David Lockhart’s ‘inspire the individual rather than follow a class curriculum’ approach – Marshall decided that he could and should make a go of it as a professional painter. That year was his most prolific in terms of paintings produced. But after a year an opportunity came up along the road. David Lockhart, Brian Keany and Marshall had been responsible for the art exhibition that marked the opening of the Lochgelly Centre in 1976. By 1980, the Centre committed to operating at a more intense level in their art department  (imagine an entire art department at Lochgelly Centre!).  Their advertisement, according to Marshall, was something along the lines of  “we need someone with photographic skills, we need someone who can work in an art department, somebody who can do teaching“. In his home town! “ I thought very carefully about it and I thought ‘I’ll come here for a wee while’ ”. He’s still there.

It’s meant that he could cut out the wee fillers and pot-boilers, and he thinks he has probably averaged five or six paintings per year - a very modest output, always working in watercolours on cartridge paper, using rollers, wet-on-wet techniques, sponges, and pen and ink. The scale was limited by his ambitions, his self-imposed quality controls, and the constant refining of the same material. The style is extraordinarily unchanged. A Marshall Dickson from the 2000s can be immediately linked to one from the late 1960s. He can talk about an old painting as though he’s just painted it.  It’s like one of his long perspectives: they go on and on, and there’s always a chink of light to motivate further.

The art department has survived a little better than the industrial relics around the town, now almost all gone, but there’s still a sense of history around the place rather than future.  However, you can turn up to a class every week with Marshall in charge, offering constructive and helpful advice and comment.

Marshall’s own output has slowed, especially since Covid, but there’s a recent painting on the wall in the Centre Café. It’s recognizably in the same style, and although the subject matter is current, and bereft of industrial heritage, the decay remains. What doesn’t decay is Marshall’s attitude to life: sharp, positive, protective of facts, observing, processing, understanding what’s around him.  He’s never been one for ambition. He sees what life brings and makes the best of it.

Steam engines, industrial heritage – he’s made the best of them too.