Photograph of artist David McFarlane

Painting

David McFarlane is an artist who used his experiences as a worker in the Clydebank shipyards to produce a large mural, depicting scenes of working life in the shipyards.

David began work as an apprentice plater in the Clydebank shipyards in 1966, at the age of sixteen. After his five year apprenticeship, he left the shipyards and travelled abroad. In 1978 he painted this mural which is in Glasgow Transport Museum The mural took three months to complete. Here he talks about what inspired some of the interesting scenes that he painted.

Part of a mural showing two men working inside the hull of a ship

David McFarlane Artist 2004

"I quite like to show the two men coming out of the double bottoms because people have no concept how difficult a job that was.

Because they were in a space you couldn't swing a cat in, you had to crawl in those places and it just went on and on all the way through the ship…You can see those guys trying to struggle out, everyone found there own way in and out. It was really hard."

Painting of a shipyard with an oilrig in the background

"Here, for example, in the background is an oil rig getting floated out to the North Sea. So that's the modernisation from the old ways like riveting and things. The technology that's in the oil rig is unbelievable… but fundamentally the way they build an oil rig was the way they built ships. They still needed the men to use the basic skills."