Joe Urie

Finding out about, and working at St Vincent Crescent

Clip Title	Finding out about, and working at St Vincent Crescent
Interviewee Name	Joe Urie
Interviewee Role	Early Member of the Print Studio in the first premises in St Vincent Crescent.
Interviewer Name	Kerry Patterson
Interview Date	2 August 2018
Clip Length	3 minutes 4 seconds

Transcription

JU: I started painting in the late sixties, you know, sixty-eight, and I produced quite a large body of work and- and I liked Ensor, you know, and the Surrealists - Paul Delvaux, Odilon Redon [laughs] and I really loved their prints. As you do when you start up painting you read all these books, art books and I always wondered how did they do these prints? And by a strange twist of fate [laughs] I bought an Evening Times one day, or one night, one eve [laughs], and at the back of the Evening Times there was a little advert, it was a really tiny little advert that says ‘Printmaking Classes Glasgow Print Studio’, and I went, this is it! [laughs] And, I popped round to- it’s in Finnieston, you know Finnieston area. But at that time it was quite industrial it was all engineering places. So I was looking for a warehouse or a big industrial estate and I found St. Vincent Crescent, the house on St. Vincent Crescent [laughs]. And it was this lovely house, you know. So in those days, y’know, to communicate with people we’d these big black phones, I don’t know if you remember [laughs], with dials and… So, I chapped the door and Sheena [McGregor] opened the door, with red hair, she had red hair and I’d long red hair [laughs] and I said, I’d like to learn lithography, and she said come in, there was nobody there, it was just me and Sheena, and she showed me round the house. And, to the left was the - if you’re in the house to the left was the etching room, it was just a wee… Elspeth Lamb she was sitting sort of, she used to sit there and do copper etchings. And then Sheena showed me to the right was the litho room y’know. So there was this big massive beast in this, in the litho room and eh, if you’re painting you’ll never have experienced this before, it’s all mechanical, it’s very mechanical, it took me months to learn how to do this. So she gave me these plates, and it was litho plates. I don’t know if you still get litho plates, or- I didn’t try stone litho, y’know. I think Elspeth she went to a place in California which specialises in stone-litho. In fact there was an artist from California he came when I was working there, Ron somebody-

KP: Ron Glassman?

JU: Ron, eh, was it Ron Glassman? I forget his surname. Anyway he specialised in stone litho. So she showed me how to do it and I learned quite quick.