When Douglas Gordon thanked the ‘Scotia Nostra’ at the Turner Prize award ceremony in 1996 the event was on national television. The term has been much quoted since then but few if any people know of its origins.
In the 1960s a number of painters from Edinburgh College of Art got jobs at English art schools as heads of painting departments. Charlie Pulsford at Wolverhampton, Roddy Carmichael at Birmingham, Alex McNeish at Exeter, Bruce Black at Bradford and then Norwich, Tommy Watt at Canterbury, John Bellany at Croydon. Bill Crozier, from Glasgow School of Art, was Head of Painting and then Head of School at Winchester. Other painters were employed as full-time lecturers.
My good friend Peter Stitt, who lived in London at the time, was one Scottish artist among others who benefitted from all these fellow Scots and survived on the money he could make from going the rounds of these art schools as a visiting lecturer – two days here, a week there.
Peter, as I’ve mentioned before, was a wonderful wit. He never told a joke as such, he made humour out of the everyday. When he went to visit John Bellany soon after his liver transplant Helen, John’s wife, warned him not to make John laugh as his stitches might give way and open up his still-healing surgical wounds. Ignoring this obviously sound advice Peter immediately began speculating with John about character of who might have been his organ donor. John laughed so much he had to beg Peter to stop.
It was Peter who used the term the ‘Scotia Nostra’ to describe this network of Scottish painters in those English art schools who could always be relied upon for part-time teaching jobs. The term itself translated from the Latin is, in this context, pretty meaningless – Our Scotland – but Peter was making a play on the sound of it and how close it was to the well-known Italian phrase used to describe the Italian Mafia – the ‘Cosa Nostra’ meaning – Our Thing.
I often told the story of Peter and the ‘Scotia Nostra’ to my students over the years at GSA. It invariably got a good laugh but it was also describing a way of surviving as an artist through visiting and part-time teaching.
It wasn’t long after Douglas had thanked the ‘Scotia Nostra’ at that award ceremony than the YBAs and their supporters began speculating that the award was a ‘stitch-up’. That somehow some group of clandestine Scottish influencers had stolen the prize from the eagerly anticipated, and expected winner, Gary Hume. Just the kind of dissembling humour that Peter would have revelled in.
Note:
How and why did all these Scottish artists end up getting jobs at English art schools?
According to Sandy Moffat, ‘in the wake of the Coldstream Report (1960) art schools were expected to pull their socks up and a return to a rigorous educational programme was needed. Who better than the Scots with their protestant work ethic to carry this out. English external examiners who visited Scottish art schools returned with reports of disciplined life classes, anatomy lessons, composition, hard-working students etc etc.’
Of course, it didn’t quite work out as many of them were heavy drinkers with a liking for ‘the hard stuff’ and visiting staff provided the opportunity for late night drinking sessions. Thus the Scotia Nostra took form.