Interview with artist and sculptor Albert Sinclair — by his son the author and composer Paul Roland.
June 2023

P: When did you take up art seriously and what prompted you to do so?
A: I must have been in my early 20s. This was the late 1940s. I had been writing short stories and comedy sketches for TV but that hadn’t been working out too well. My ideas appeared uncredited to me and that put me off writing as a career. So, then I switched to learning a number of languages including Russian and German and after that I decided to enrol at the Glasgow School of Art which was a prestigious institution for a couple of terms. They were offering evening classes so I could go after work (I was working for the ‘Daily Record’ newspaper at the time) and I was following in the footsteps of my brother Joe and Sister Betty who were both very talented artists. I thought, if nothing else, I could at least have the pleasure of looking at what I had made displayed in my own room if I drew or painted pictures or made small sculptures.
Occasionally the teachers provided a theme, but more often they simply supervised the students and gave us guidance.


P: What did you learn during this time and what did you discover about your own approach to art?
A: One of my strong points was that I was always eager to experiment with my own mixes which were usually but not always clay based and this would remain malleable for a couple of days before it began to harden and I would bind it. I would finish up with a solid structure and give it a bronze or whatever finish I fancied....
At the same time I was developing my own style of drawing based on the illustrations by such diverse artists as Gustave Dore, Rembrandt and the politicalcartoonists who published in ‘Punch’ as well as illustrators such as Boz and Gerald Scarfe. I didn’t have such a great sense of colour so I concentrated on pen and ink. My idea was to create high quality drawings that made a point. I tried to find humour in situations and characters, but I was open to anything if it came off.

My main concern with the sculpture was to get something stable, so I carved in clay. I experimented a lot with heads and with forming figures around a wire frame using a clay, epoxy resin mix, plaster or cement on a wooden base. After making a descriptive figure I then found it a challenge to create a realistic figure from my imagination with texture, colour and character.

As I worked, the personality emerged or evolved. A shape might suggest a hat or a waistcoat and so I would follow that until that feature was clear to anyone looking at it. The attitude of the figure would tell a story or depict a specific action or relationship between two personalities if there was more than one figure. The head was invariably the focus as I was seeking to give each a distinct personality and when I felt I could add no more, I derived a lot of satisfaction from giving each a different finish, such as bronze.
Similarly, in my drawings a figure or group would emerge as I worked on it, suggesting a scene or a particular group in a situation whether that was dramatic or contemplative.  

By the time I married and moved down to Kent in the 1960s I joined various local societies and through them and my own initiative I began to have small one-man exhibitions in libraries and was invited to contribute to group exhibitions at Canterbury Cathedral. I travelled all over the county as part of my job and took the opportunity to introduce myself to local libraries who would offer me a room for a couple of weeks to stage an exhibition. It was quite successful and they would phone me every so often to tell me a piece or two had been sold – sometimes to tourists particularly in the case of the Canterbury Cathedral exhibitions. I believe my work has travelled all over the world, though I’ll never know where!