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Maurice Whitbread's Address given on Thursday 2nd March 2000 at The Church of St. John the Evangelist, Edinburgh
I first met Edward Gage about 25 years ago when I came to Napier College (as it was then) where he was a Senior Lecturer, as part of a visiting panel from the CNAA to determine whether Napier was fit to run a degree course in Industrial Design. I’m glad to report that they were and that since he and I were near contemporaries and both odd men out in the world of Industrial Design we got on well together. This was the first of many visits to Napier as I was asked to be an external examiner on the course and I began to discover more about Edward’s life and many interests.
At around this time in 1977 he published a book on Scottish painting since 1945. It had the title ‘The Eye In The Wind’ I’d like to quote what he wrote about this title.
"The title, ‘The Eye In The Wind’, is not a quotation but a phrase that just came, by chance, to mind like an appropriate gift. When I examined it, I realised that the wind was the one element of weather which always seemed to be active in Scotland; the eye is the receiver of the visual image; the eye in the wind is both the eye of the Scottish painter and my own eye - because the wind is the agency of change and winnows the wheat from the chaff. Lastly the word ‘window’ derives from the Old Norse word, vindauga ,which is a combination of the word for wind and the word for eye (literally an ‘eye of the wind’ - i.e. an opening for the air to enter); and a painting, of course, is a window into a man’s mind".
There is the authentic voice of Edward Gage - persuasive, poetic, original - in love with art and with language. I should like to add to what he wrote on this title a definition of the wind itself
"Air in more or less rapid natural motion" because this is how I came to see Edward himself - thundering over the cobbled streets in his car from one arena of activity to another - to college in the morning -to be a teacher -to an exhibition he had to review - to the Scotsman to meet a deadline - home to the family - to read a book he’d been sent to criticise and still able to fill the house with his paintings.
I remember one of these paintings in particular because it hung in the hall for a while at his home. It was a painting of the Fall of Icarus. A piece of the brilliant Mediterranean sea and sky that was so much the home of his personal mythology
Most of you will know the legend of Icarus fitted with wings by his father Daedalus, warned not to fly too close to the sun or the wax that held the feathers in would melt. But Icarus- filled with the exultation of flight soared and climbed too high and the feathers dropped from the wings and he fell and was lost in what came to be named The Sea of Icarus.
It was only when I came to respond to Valerie Gage’s request that I speak about him here today that I came to see how fitting it was to see Edward’s life as a special individual version of this myth for our own time.
Those of you who are part of this city will know better than I ever can the rich and generous contribution Edward Gage made to its artistic and cultural life. The sun certainly played its part - it lit his paintings. But the heat, the fire the melting excitement came from within. I was always astonished at how many things he was involved in. I was sadly not surprised when the pressures that were the power of his life abruptly struck and paralysed him. But the modern myth of Icarus has to be brought up to date. We can no longer focus only on the fall and convenient disappearance under the waves. We have to consider the survival of Icarus.
For me more terrible than the fall itself is the survival. It is the contrast between the ‘The Eye In The Wind’ - the man in full ecstatic flight and the man who had to lie still and accept whatever care was bestowed upon him. For someone as active and dynamic as he had been and hoped always to be, to have to be lifted and turned and helped to eat and never again to get up like his beloved cat and walk out of the french windows into the world outside must have been true purgatory. It might easily have driven any one of us mad.
But Edward Gage survived. He did not go mad. He took it on and did the best he could to resist and fight back - against the illnesses that lay in wait for him - he made plans to write a book on art and photography - he turned to poetry - he tried somehow to paint - above all he made friends of those who came to help his ever loving wife to care for him. I came to see him and his wife Valerie (who could not easily be parted even briefly from him) as heroic figures.
It is to them both that I dedicate the new myth of the survival of Icarus which must contain not only the glorious and generous flight of those active years but the sudden terrible failure of the wings and then the stubborn refusal to surrender until his last breath had been gasped out. That after all - to turn to Edward’s beloved dictionary -is the meaning of a GAGE - a pledge - a glove - a gauntlet thrown down as a challenge to a fight or to a struggle for life itself.
EDWARD GAGE MBE.
We salute you and mourn your passing
29/2/00-2/3/00
