Harry Magee

The importance of the Print Studio as an accessible workshop and gallery space

Clip Title	The importance of the Print Studio as an accessible workshop and gallery space
Interviewee Name	Harry Magee
Interviewee Role	Joined the Ingram Street workshop after doing an evening class and later involved with the organisation's Board.
Interviewer Name	Kerry Patterson
Interview Date	31 October 2019
Clip Length	2 minutes 14 seconds

Transcription

KP: It does, the Print Studio does seem to have provided that role of kind of an arts centre, kind of hub really, before, at the time where there wasn’t really any equivalent?

HM: Absolutely, yes. There was the CCA [formerly Third Eye Centre] but [pauses] I suppose in the long, distant past there was the Glasgow Art Club, and Glasgow Boys were trying to get into it and that was the equivalent I suppose, when people were ‘clubbing’ people! Professional classes, you joined a club. You had to be, presumably, nominated. You couldn’t just pay your money, you had to be elected, all that kind of thing. But all that was, dead in the water [by the 1970s]. I was at school, secondary school in the fifties, and I regularly went to the RGI exhibition in the McLellan Galleries, and er… artists were really struggling in those days. There was no market in Glasgow. If you wanted to succeed and you had a talent you had to go to London. You couldn’t stay. And even by the time I got to art school which was 62-66 and went on to Jordanhill, almost everybody went on to teacher training college. Unless you’d done graphics maybe, or interior design, you might have got a job, again, probably in London. Eh, so there wasn’t really that output, outlet for artists who wanted to carry on being painters unless you got back into the art school. Or were focussed enough to be able to be a schoolteacher, and paint in the summer holidays, which was hard work to keep that going, and then, where were you going to exhibit? Because there were very few galleries outside things like the RGI, or the RSA or any of these open exhibitions, very few galleries.