Telephone boxes on Cowal, Glasgow taxis covered in Irn Bru ads, an empty Paisley railway station, the Ritz Cafe’s menuboard (“hot apple pie £2.80”), Glasgow water towers, the ferry to Wemyss Bay, dogs on leads, Empire biscuits and strawberry tarts, geese honking in Millport, girls carrying Topshop bags, hoodies on trains.
This is Scotland. At least it’s Wil Freeborn’s Scotland. The country he’s been sketching in some 20-odd notebooks over the past couple of years.
It’s not the picture postcard Scotland, the Colin Prior Scotland, the VisitScotland Scotland, but a more down-at-heel, mundane, everyday place. It’s the Scotland he prefers.
“Beautiful panoramas make for quite difficult sketches,” he explains as we sit in the kitchen of his Gourock flat, the light bouncing around its white walls. “It kind of forces you to look out for something that may not be particularly interesting to anyone but that is the actual identity of the place.”
By day Freeborn is a web designer, designing websites for museums and stables and Scottish Ballet among others. But in his spare time he takes his bike, hops on a ferry and goes exploring. “It’s almost like turning it back into an adventure. It’s like a childhood thing,” he says.
“You have a woolly idea of where you live. My image of Scotland was always urban. Everything apart from that seemed to be rolling hills and beautiful vistas and that’s been done so many times. So it’s good to just go to Arran, or Dunoon, or Kilcreggan and just draw what you find there.
“And rolling hills always look the same, so you have to literally discover stuff of your own. Just the random stuff that you can overlook, the ordinary stuff.”
Born in Dumfries, Freeborn came to Glasgow School Of Art to study environmental art. “I was working in neon and spaces. It was part of that era. A lot of students stopped drawing and went for installation work.”
He liked the city so much he stayed for years, but soon learned he was not going to make a living from fine art. Hence his move into design. It was only when he finally moved out of the city that he started drawing again.
“I hadn’t been doing any artwork for years. Moving myself even half an hour out of Glasgow I’d start with a train journey every morning and that basically got me going again.”
He started by drawing the people on the train. “You’ve got 20 to 30 minutes of a commute every day and you can either read or draw. And if you draw every day you start to notice yourself getting better and you lose that worry that it’s got to be good. It just becomes a routine and it’s disposable. It’s quite a nice place for the mind to be in because you let it go a wee bit.”
From there the exploring began. Because? Well, as he admits: “There’s not a fantastic amount to do in Gourock.” So he started taking his bike and going island-hopping, discovering a corner of the country he called home. “I’d spent 10 years in Glasgow and never been anywhere, swear to God. I’ve never gone up a Munro or on a ferry or hadn’t gone to the coast.”
In the first instance he didn’t venture far. “For the last two years I wasn’t driving, so all that time it was exactly the distance that I could cycle, get on a ferry, cycle and then come back again. So it was literally a tiny wee circle around me. This year I’ve got a car. I do want to get further.”
In one sense he already has. His drawings go round the world via the urban sketchers website (www.urbansketchers.com). They can also be accessed via his own website and Flickr account. “There’s a huge online community of people doing exactly the same thing around the world. Flickr is quite supportive because everyone’s commenting on your work and you’re commenting on their work, so although you’re drawing your own little part of the world it’s not really in isolation because other people are doing it on the other side of the world. They’re pretty much doing the same thing as you but they could be in Texas or France.”
He still finds it amazing that from where he lives he can go off on a Sunday, jump on a ferry, cycle round Arran and be back for teatime. “It’s weird that you can go all the way out there and be back to see the news.”
What he’s discovered over the last couple of years, he says, is that Glasgow is not the centre of the universe. Now he wants to visit the edge of his solar system.
“I’d like to plan a trip round the whole of Scotland and then you get a narrative between one place and the next.” In fact, he has a notion of turning his hobby into a travel book. He’s been talking to fellow blogger Anne Ward who’s behind the quirky Scottish travel website Nothing To See Here. “She kind of looks at the Scotland that isn’t really seen by a lot of people, quite brutal modernist stuff, libraries, fish and chip shops. I think that’s the Scotland most of us live in.”
It’s certainly the Scotland he’s drawn to in his drawings. What is this? A pastime, a pleasure, and, as he says, an adventure. “I wouldn’t consider what I do an art. It’s more like a travelogue.” It’s a travelogue that takes in the good, the dull and the scuffed-round-the-edges. But that’s okay. That’s how it should be, Freeborn reckons. “You can’t have Scotland without the hairy bits.”
For more information visit www.wilfreeborn.co.uk. A book of Wil Freeborn’s drawings is available via www.blurb.com/bookstore
