Gray’s School of Art: 140 Years - Never make a head bigger than a melon

By Lena Kammerer, 13.03.2026

In 1885, Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, named after its benefactor, the local businessman and philanthropist John Gray, opened its doors to welcome its first ever cohort of students. One hundred and forty years later, an exhibition at Aberdeen Art Gallery, adjacent to the school’s original premises on Schoolhill, reflects on how studio practice, teaching, and artistic relationships at one of Scotland’s four original art schools have evolved over the decades.

The numerous striking exhibits on display, spanning many generations of students and teachers at Gray’s, vividly illustrate the evolution of the school’s pedagogy: from a curriculum that emerged within the context of a growing industrial city to the consolidation of a contemporary approach grounded in studio culture, learning through making and practice-led research.

There is a marble bust of John Gray at the exhibition entrance, carved by Henry Bain Smith and presented by the citizens of Aberdeen in gratitude for Gray’s gift of an art school to the city. It stands as a distinct reminder of the institution’s beginnings as Gray’s School of Science and Art, a title that signalled its close connection to the scientific and utilitarian traditions of art education it emerged from.

Bain Smith had attended art classes at the Aberdeen Mechanics’ Institute, the city’s first provider of formal art instruction, which was part of a wider nineteenth-century movement committed to providing technical and practical education for adult workers across Britain. Gray, notably, became the Institute’s director in 1859. It later became Robert Gordon University, of which Gray’s School of Art is part today.

Teaching at Gray’s has been substantially shaped by its historical ties to the Aberdeen Mechanics’ Institute. Life drawing and painting, as well as still life, are important practices at Gray’s rooted in these connections, cultivating observational skills and visual judgement: a learning of how to look and how to see.

A selection of accomplished paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, all depicting male nude figures in various poses, by Ian McKenzie Smith, Sylvia Wishart, Bill Connon, Brian Blacklaws, and John Boyd, demonstrates the enduring power of these attention-demanding exercises. A wooden measuring stick is positioned alongside the works, which was used by Connon, student and later teacher at Gray’s, to teach principles of proportion and eye level.

The 1960s heralded a profound transformation at Gray’s, reshaping first its teaching structure and then dramatically altering its physical environment. In 1960, in response to the Coldstream Report on arts education reform, the school introduced a foundational year designed to foster students’ creative confidence. Drawing on principles of Bauhaus and Basic Design and encouraging collaboration, experimentation and play, the curriculum was developed by a new generation of Gray’s artists: Derek Ashby, George Mackie, Fred Stiven, and Ainslie Yule.

The two displayed sculptures by Ashby, along with Stiven’s “boxed reliefs,” embody this shift toward a renewed awareness of and engagement with the modern world. While their works are characterised by a simple, ordered, yet impactful arrangement of forms and materials, Stiven remains true to Gray’s long-standing discipline of still life, reimagining its classical roots by incorporating it into wooden boxes while Ashby explores the wider social context of the Cold War space race with his ‘Homage to Yuri Gagarin’ (1968).

In 1966, Gray’s relocated from the city centre to a newly-built modernist building on the Garthdee Estate in the south-west of Aberdeen, designed by former student Michael Shewan. Conceived as an open, forward-looking space inspired by the “skin and bones” architecture of modernist architect and last Bauhaus director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the building displays a distinct sensitivity to landscape, light, structure, and material clarity. These qualities are already evident in Shewan’s 1965 preliminary drawing, where bright white lines against a dark blue ground set out to imagine what could be.

Now towering above the River Dee and removed from the city centre, the school no longer benefits from the direct link between studios and galleries that once gave its students constant access to Aberdeen’s vast art collection. However, Gray’s geography has instead fostered a culture of imaginative travel, rooted in reflection, observation, memory, and storytelling.

Joyce W. Cairns’s ‘The Drying Green’ (1990) places the artist at the centre of the scene, surrounded by figures of Footdee (Fittie), the fishing village on the edge of Aberdeen harbour where she spent many years of her life. Standing at the washing line that anchors the composition, she intertwines personal memory with the life of the community around her.

“Never make a head bigger than a melon” forms the subtitle of this anniversary exhibition at Aberdeen Art Gallery. It was the advice given by artist and educator Sylvia Wishart during a life drawing class at Gray’s. With ‘May 1968, Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen’ (2016–2017), Andrew Cranston immortalised this guidance in a painting that depicts many of the school’s notable figures gathered in a room.

The composition appears deliberately strange in the stiffness of its figures, with an anatomical skeleton hanging in the background, while a watermelon sits next to the back of Frances Walker’s head. With it, Cranston humorously encapsulates Gray’s distinctive identity that encourages sustained observation and technical engagement as much as curiosity, experimentation and imagination.

Gray’s School of Art: 140 Years – Never Make a Head Bigger Than a Melon is exhibited at Aberdeen Art Gallery until 12 April 2026.