Rosaleen Orr

Died: March 12, 2015

Rosaleen Orr, who has died at the age of 79, was a Kilbarchan-based artist, poet, and author. A vivacious, golden-haired woman, she combined her talent for painting with a flair for language and the widest of cultural interests.

The daughter of an engine-driver father and spirited Catholic mother with Communist sympathies, she was born in Glasgow but spent her early childhood in Edinburgh. She returned to Glasgow when she was seven and was educated at Garnethill Convent School. There she showed a talent not just for art but for playing the violin.

At the early age of 16, she was accepted by Glasgow School of Art. In spite of her youth, she shone there, winning the high-prestige Guthrie Prize for portraiture in her final year and also the drawing prize for third and fourth year students in her third year.

This was a vintage era for the art school, where her teachers included David Donaldson, later the Queen's Limner in Scotland, and the formidably talented William and Mary Armour. Her contemporaries included Robert Mulhern, to whom she was married for 53 years.

As with art graduates of her generation, she was expected to embrace the teaching profession. Her successful classroom career culminated in the post of principal art teacher in St Roch's Secondary School in Glasgow's East End. She would joke that she escaped from teaching at 50. But her classroom experiences would provide rich material for future literary work.

In the decades after her retirement - what a misnomer that word is in her case - she and Robert briefly ran, in Glasgow's West End, a ballet school, inherited from the distinguished teacher and choreographer Catherine Wells; and then an art gallery in the picturesque Renfrewshire village of Kilbarchan.

There, they lived initially in a house opposite Mary Armour but moved to the upper floor of a whitewashed old cottage, approached by a quaint little bridge over a lane. They called it, appropriately, The Studio.

It was an Aladdin's cave of creativity. Its walls glowed with sumptuous oil paintings, including still lifes and flower studies by Rosaleen, as well as portraits of Kilbarchan residents - including a chef and a delightful Kilbarchan gala queen, with garlanded hair and a shimmering white dress, from under which a pair of boots peeped.

Portraiture had remained one of her fortes from art-school days. Outstanding portraits by her include one of her cousin Delia's husband, Jo Beltrami, the celebrated lawyer; and sympathetic studies of the actor-comedian Jimmy Logan and Scotland's first poet laureate, Edwin Morgan, whom she greatly admired.

She and her husband shared an enthusiasm for opera. His sumptuous study of the opera star Claire Rutter was matched by her romantic full-length double portrait of the soprano and her husband Stephen Gadd, in their roles as the Count and Countess in the Marriage of Figaro in a Scottish Opera production.

There is a luminous quality about the brushwork in Rosaleen Orr's paintings. She exhibited widely - at the Royal Scottish Academy, Royal Glasgow Institute, Paisley Art Institute, and Glasgow Art Club, among many venues. In 1970 she was one of 15 Scottish artists, including Donaldson, Goudie and Crosbie, to share a successful exhibition in London and then Hamburg. Later, and closer to home, she won the Macfarlane Trust Award in the Scottish drawing competition, run by the Paisley Art Institute, in 1993.

All this would in itself constitute a distinguished career, but Orr's creative gift extended into the world of writing. In 2003 she shared first prize in the inaugural McCash Scots Poetry Competition, run jointly by The Herald and Glasgow University, and was again in the winner's list in the most recent competition.

And, then, there are her novels. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer six years ago, she did not have the strength to wield paint brushes. Her creativity merely diverted into writing, drawing on the rich recesses of her imagination and experience of life. She started reading voraciously (all of Dickens, and works by Trollope, Balzac, and Zola) almost a crash course in novel writing, says her husband. Five manuscripts appeared in quick succession.

The first was published last autumn. Up Roystonhill is a darkly comic thriller set in Glasgow's East End, with a large cast, ranging from nuns and cleaning ladies to a wayward priest and a drunken poet; a combination of melodrama, farce, and poetic overview.

Her second book, Postcards from Garda, retains some characters from Up Roystonhill but is set on the lovely Italian lake. The book will be published next month; too late, sadly, for Rosaleen to see, although she had the pleasure of knowing it was accepted and in the pipeline.

Her poetry was yet another gift. Her 2003 McCash prize-winner was called, like the later novel, Up Roystonhill. Though it does not share the plot, it catches vividly the East-End ambience and the feral energy of the young gang members she describes with considerable affection. In a charming snippet, The Midnight Gardener, she explains how "The Midnight Gardener steals a March in April."

Poems in Postcards from Garda are attributed to a young nun who turns to lay life and love. But they are essentially Orr's response to the scenery and history of this most civilised corner of Europe.

Her humour - and mastery of contemporary demotic Scots - bubbles up in a variety of other poems.

In all her endeavours, she was supported by Robert, and was equally supportive of his creative gifts. She will be greatly missed by him, daughters Claire and Maria, granddaughter Saskia, and son-in-law Brian; and by her friends. Her secular funeral service was accompanied by solo violin music by J S Bach.

LESLEY DUNCAN