Artist who created his own market and defied categorisation
As an artist, Bob Cargill defied
neat categorisation; at one level he painted watercolours for a market he created for himself on the Angus coast, an exercise he loved and at which he was accomplished but which he readily admitted was undertaken primarily to keep the wolf from the door while allowing him time and space to pursue deeper, more technically challenging objectives.
He was always desperate to paint and always desperate to show. Often the suffocating artistic atmosphere of Scotland would frustrate him. His handful of close friends in Arbroath in the seventies became used to Bob railing against the Glasgow-Edinburgh ''mafia'' who dominated Scottish artistic taste and the closed shop of city galleries who operated for their own and their cronies' mutual benefit. He detested bourgeois attitudes, yet he was trapped by them.
In the very early days Bob even commandeered his mother's spotless, white-tiled fish shop in Arbroath's West Port to show and sell paintings. It was unconventional to say the least. Ordinary Arbroath folk could buy their smokies and purchase a watercolour at the same time.
While steeped in the ''Fit o' the Toon'' fishing community, its traditions, and its values, Bob Cargill resolved early to break free from its straitjacket. He would not follow the family business of fish curing, making the smokies for which his late father and mother were justly famed from their wonderful house at the sea end of the High Street.
By dint of sheer bloody-minded persistence Bob got his paintings before an audience. Over the years some local people, recognising the truth of an eye capable of catching and interpreting the unique atmosphere of Arbroath's fishing heritage, built up considerable collections. Bob Cargill painted the boats, the forest of masts, the harbour, the sea, and the rocks. He painted the red sea cliffs - particularly the Deil's Heid - and he painted the cliff-top village of Auchmithie, his spiritual home. It was on the remote, cliff-girt beaches that he collected the tidemark debris - pieces of driftwood or sun-dried seaweed - which became part of his ''other'' paintings, the works on which his much wider reputation was built.
Influenced by the Italian new realism school of the fifties and sixties, Bob created a body of challenging, difficult works - brooding canvases, sometimes studded with the objets trouves of the beach, more often with the burnt hessian from the fish-curing barrels out in the back yard.
Richard Demarco was one who recognised that this sometimes dour, obdurate, figure was saying something different about his particular east coast environment, and showed Bob Cargill in Edinburgh in 1969.
He had travelled a long way. His first job had been as a printer at the Arbroath Herald, a secure trade he gave up aged 23 to study at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee.
He would not teach so he was - literally - the struggling artist; the strain contributed to the breakup of his first marriage to Jean.
Bob Cargill was recognised with various awards, by television, and by major collectors and in the 1980s he and his second wife, Val, ran the Cargill Gallery next to the High Street house. It was probably never really viable, but the atmosphere was magical. There was a welcome for old friends in a house which breathed Scottish painting.
Robert (Bob) Cargill was born in Arbroath in 1940 and died in Arbroath on April 27 this year, but the bare dates conceal a remarkable, in some respects, inspiring story. His death from a heart attack occurred shortly after he returned to Arbroath from six years in Majorca where he had sought to paint in a fresh atmosphere for a new audience.
He is survived by Val and his four daughters, two from each marriage.
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