The Public Catalogue Foundation

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Gable Fine Art is delighted to announce it has acquired a body of work by Alistair Park (1930 – 1984) who suffered an untimely death at the age of 54. Born in 1930, Park grew up in Kirkcaldy and studied at the Edinburgh College of Art and subsequently went on to teach art in Bradford and Newcastle. Clearly influenced by both the expressionist avant-garde protagonists such as Nolde and Kirchner, Park also shows a leaning towards the Art-Brut as espoused by Dubuffet in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Here is a link to an article by writer and academic Ian Massey who also delves into Park’s period in the mid 1960’s where he became engaged with the subject of Kennedy’s assassination in his ‘Flags and Banners’ series and also his group and solo exhibitions in London, Toronto and provincially.

http://www.thepcf.org.uk/artists/116/reference/43/

Park’s son Stephen went on to become one of the initial wave of YBA’s and exhibited with Damien Hirst, Satah Lucas and Michael Landy amongst others at the seminal Freeze Exhibition of 1988. Alistair Park was prone to depression and alcoholism and when art direction in the 1970’s moved away from paint-based media and continued the 1960’s trend towards conceptualise he deteriorated into isolated and detached solitude and died in 1984 as a result of his self-administered addiction. Ian Massey writes: ‘Towards the end of that decade a hemorrhage resulted in the loss of vision in one eye, and aggravated a longstanding depressive tendency. Bouts of difficult behaviour exacerbated by increased alcohol consumption made him progressively harder to live with, and eventually his wife left him. Though he later returned to painting, showing with Richard Demarco’s Edinburgh gallery in the early eighties, Alistair Park died following a heart failure at the age of fifty-four in August 1984.’

The Public Catalogue Foundation

The Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) is cataloguing the entire national collection of oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom. It is a registered charity. In partnership with the BBC, it is putting this collection online, making it freely accessible to all.
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