ON a brilliantly sunny day, family, friends, colleagues and well-wishers gathered outside Greenock Crematorium to say farewell to artist George Wyllie.

Inside, the mood at the 30-minute-long humanist service was anything but sombre. Celebrant Victoria Bisland raised smiles as she told how Wyllie had once built a small boat in the family home in Northern Ireland, adding that the wall and window had to be removed so his creation could get on to the water.

She also recalled the works of art for which he was most famous, including the paper boat that sailed on the Clyde and the straw locomotive that was suspended from Finnieston Crane.

Makar Liz Lochhead, a close friend of Wyllie's, read out, to applause, a poem she had written in honour of the artist's 75th birthday and afterwards, outside in the sunshine, she praised the artist who died at Inverclyde Royal Infirmary last week, aged 90.

Lochhead said: "George was a great artist and communicator, and a great populariser. He was completely open to life, an absolute one-off."

Earlier, Ms Bisland told mourners: "It is natural to be sad today as you reflect on the fact George is no longer here. In another sense, though, the fact he was once a part of your lives can never be lost."

She added the congregation had been "joined by new life", a reference to eight-week-old Tara Linn-Moran, Wyllie's grand-niece whom he was due to meet, but whose visit had to be cancelled when Wyllie fell ill.

She narrated details from the personal life of Shettleston-born Wyllie, who was forever known as Ralston to those closest to him. She spoke of his lifelong loves of jazz and sailing.

The service heard how, as an engineer with the Royal Navy, Wyllie travelled widely and, together with some shipmates, visited Hiroshima and witnessed the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped two months earlier.

Ms Bisland said: "It was his time [there] that really influenced his philosophy of life. The memories of the atrocities he witnessed never left him."

When he was older, as he embraced art his attitudes to life changed considerably, "and he went from being a strict father to his teenage daughters" to a man who embraced surrealism.

Ms Bilsland said Wyllie "always approached his work with a sense of humour and nostalgia, although it should never be forgotten there was always a more serious underlying message".

Wyllie's grandson Calvin, an artist who has worked with such people as Damien Hirst, laid on top of the coffin a shaman's arrow, fashioned by his grandfather, which was intended to send him off on his voyage. Wyllie's trademark bunnet was in the coffin.

The service ended with one of the artist's favourite songs, The Folks Who Live On The Hill.