The one at Hillhead station includes, among many other things, the image of a young Alasdair Gray writing while staring at his own head, which appears to have been decapitated from a second body, which lies on the table in front of him.

These paintings suggest both William Blake and Walt Disney some are somber, serious things, but many convey a kind of muffled laughter.

You see his murals at subway stops-he is also an accomplished painter-and on the wall of a restaurant and bar called The Ubiquitous Chip, and on the ceiling of the Òran Mór cultural center. Gray’s presence in Glasgow is persistent and mercurial: you never quite know where he’ll crop up next. “He did this while also resisting some of the very anodyne narratives that emerged as Glasgow ‘regenerated’ under neoliberalism.” In the Glasgow that Gray helped to imagine-in books like “1982, Janine,” “Poor Things,” and, especially, “Lanark”-“adolescents and artists flourish who are over-sensitive, and in their masculinity insecure,” Gerard Carruthers, of the University of Glasgow, said. He “played a central role during the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties in reimagining literary Glasgow, and largely bypassing all those tired clichés of gangs, hard men, and knife violence,” Gavin Miller, who wrote a book called “Alasdair Gray: The Fiction of Communion,” told me. Later, I watched a woman in a leopard-print dress with a pink plume in her hair chastise Lanark, the play’s protagonist, for not having his arm, which has become covered in dragon hide, looked at by a doctor. A member of the tech crew announced that, in order to test the sound, he would read out an entire year’s worth of winning lottery numbers. When I arrived, the cast and crew had just run through a scene in which a woman’s skin becomes covered in mouths. I was in the city to see a rehearsal of “Lanark,” an adaptation, by the playwright David Greig and the director Graham Eatough, of the novel by Alasdair Gray, which débuted at the Edinburgh International Festival, on August 23rd, in celebration of Gray’s eightieth year. I walked by the recently re-opened Clutha Vaults, a pub famously crashed into by a helicopter, in 2013. Boxy flower bouquets put up by the city council looked a bit like faces. Tall merchant houses alternated with blinkered pieces of modernism. I arrived there on a gray day in the first half of August, after walking by the water through misty rain, alongside skimming seagulls. The Citizens Theatre is located in the Gorbals, a historically poor and relatively abandoned area of Glasgow, south of the River Clyde.

Alasdair grey lanark