BLITZ

No one however could have predicted that in the first brutal onslaught on industrial Clydeside the Luftwaffe would dump the bulk of its destructive load on the small town of Clydebank. All who inhabited this small Clydeside town were effected by it’s wide spread ferocity.

 

 

 

SUBMARINE

Aesthetics have always been part of weapon making. From the moment man became tool maker he felt the need to embellish. The stone-age axe, shaped and smoothed beyond function need, the sculptured power of the Greek helmet, the beautiful lines of the Spitfire. Display of aggression needs aesthetics and there is something in us all that states, if it looks good it works better. Yet the submarine is the only weapon where aesthetics plays no part, it is designed not to be seen. The pursuit of invisibility has no need of art; the submarine is the aesthetic Anti-Christ.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IRON

It was the lifeblood of a city. For century shipbuilding sustained Glasgow - fed it, clothed it, housed it, and in return Glasgow gave its men. Hundreds of thousands of them - to be sacrificed in the cathedrals of the Shipyards, to the gods of the battleship and liner. They made their libations in sweat. Their prayer books were the pay slip and the time sheet; their litany the poetry of the imperial measurement. Anyone who thinks this a somewhat fanciful rendition of an old and well-worn story - the religious analogy a little precious - should visit Iron, Tom McKendrick's extraordinary new display at Glasgow's Collins Gallery. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HEAVIER THAN AIR

McKendrick grew up, as did everybody in Britain over the age of thirty, with an ambiguous victory. We won the war and lost the peace, and he will have watched with the same bemusement as Britain declined quietly from its imperial and industrial zeniths to become this place where we live now, rather guiltily regretting something that we've learnt, since history dispensed with it on our behalf, was shameful; an empire that retreated, leaving behind it Ulsters everywhere.

 

PORTRAITS OF SOLDIERS

The stories of the men and women in Soldiers are as important as the paintings, recording what they are in paint and what they have done in words. Tom McKendrick allows them to speak for themselves but in such a way that you are drawn to look again from first impression. After reading their stories you will look at each portrait in a new light.


Tom Mckendrick 2024 ©