ARTIST George Wyllie has won another accolade after being included in the prestigious Oxford Dictionary of National.
He is joined by Eric Lomax, Isi Metzstein, Lesley Strathie, Derick Thomson, and Jocky Wilson.
The latest update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is published today and adds biographies of 222 men and women who left their mark on British life, and who died in the year 2012.
Forty of these individuals were born, lived or worked in Scotland.
They include sculptor George Wyllie (1921-2012), church architect Isi Metzstein (1928-2012), Japanese POW and autobiographer Eric Lomax (1919-2012), the public official Lesley Strathie (1955-2012), Gaelic poet and scholar Derick Thomson (1921-2012), columnist and writer in America, Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012), and the darts player Jocky Wilson (1950-2012).
The Glasgow-born artist and sculptor George Wyllie took up sculpture at a relatively late age - his only training being a welding course in Greenock.
Sculpture remained his spare-time activity until he retired from his work as a customs and excise official in 1979.
His best-known works include Running Clock (2000), a clock on two legs running as though to catch a bus, sited outside Glasgow's Buchanan Street bus station, and Monument to Maternity (1995, installed 2004), a giant nappy pin on the site of the city’s Rottenrow Maternity Hospital.
More serious are his Straw Locomotive of 1987 (a full-sized straw effigy of a steam engine) and Paper Boat (a 78-foot long replica of an origami boat) that was launched in 1989.
Both were inspired by his indignation at the extinction of the traditional industries of the west of Scotland. Wyllie’s Paper Boat sailed to London, New York, and other ports, and carried copies of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as its cargo.
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