YSP Friend Josie Walsh gives her account of the recent trip to Glasgow

Strange to hear a seagull’s shriek in such an urban place… I’d already noted on the last morning of the Friends’ trip to Mackintosh’s Glasgow. Then a request came to record my impressions. I’m left with a stream of sound and images: general, particular, light, dark, of people met and re-acquainted, of conversations, laughter, uniquely shared experience, of days, nights, weather, meals; all jostle and will doubtless blur. I remember the Mackintosh palette: so much dream-white and ivory, that green like patina on copper, all the clear blues, thistle into indigo, the shades of summer pink, rose, the wisp grey. I can visualize the gleam of neat brass plate, or tile to ornament and of course, the unmistakeable graphics.

We met Mackintosh and Margaret his wife, by spending time in places where they had met and worked, or had drawn detailed plans for others to realise. The student photograph of ‘The Glasgow Four’ looked out on us at every venue, Charles with Margaret and Margaret’s sister Frances, who would later marry Charles’s fellow apprentice, Herbert MacNair. There is youthful expectation in that photo, no sign of the subsequent success or the sadness of the quartet’s lives. Both men with soft cravats, Mackintosh’s seems to suggest an unfurling rose. We’re told Margaret had copper-coloured hair, a lustrous link with those ‘every day’ objects in the Kelvingrove, burnished, beaten or enamelled, fine-detailed, beautiful. In a separate photo of Margaret, she has the look of Guinevere or a Celtic princess.

With the mind’s eye I can walk round Hill House in Helensburgh, remember its feel, a family house for the publisher Walter Blackie. I can see, smell those gardens and recall an incredible angle of the building on approach, like an eyelid opening to the view beyond. I can re-visit those rooms, re-conjure the alchemy of contradicting styles and upturned expectations, the mix of his baronial, turrets, towers, slit windows that surprise the brickwork and his recurring, favourite ovals. And all in collaboration with Margaret’s impressive range of metalwork, textiles, watercolours and her gessos with their languid trail of flower stems and beads.

I only have talent, Mackintosh said, Margaret has genius. They were childless; their own house underlines this. But from the time they met at Glasgow Art School, you sense they must have shared and discussed until joint ideas came to fruition. He did not cease to acknowledge her giftedness.

They would both have been very much aware of Japanese influence in both design and detail, a ventilation shaft, a hall lantern. Among the iconic pieces, I remember their writing desk like a solid black kimono, its decoration symmetrically placed with inlaid crests and mother-of-pearl fastening circles. Theirs was a melding of austere and luscious, the real or suggested. Here was the seeding, growing, flowering of art nouveau, the ever-present birds and plants seen first on our arrival at the Queen’s Cross Church. The Mackintoshes mirrored Nature, the supreme artist, in the industry of their imaginations, in the relief carving on wood or stone that highlights structure or colour.

I was intrigued by the clock on the walls of the Art School, the way its numbers seemed to hang off the outside rim, as if the day could be controlled, squared off, forget it was a circle or diurnal round. Control seemed palpable in their home, now faithfully reassembled, the light manipulated by an overhanging sill inside the window. Here too, the severe, straight-sided chairs but sometimes soft-seated, affording a hideaway in which to nod or wink away an hour.

The characteristic upturning of expectations abounds. The school in Scotland Street has impressive leaded-glass towers and magnificent tiles in the drill hall. In the Art School, from the top floor there is a greenhouse jutting into air, a ‘hen-run’ corridor for the female students, light-filled, has ceiling arches you’d associate more with a cellar. In the Library, with its fantastic array of lighting, the plentiful, non-matching upright beams are like the trunks of trees, or giant stems for their carved angular flowers, ears of wheat or corn. The ceiling is suspended.

We spent time well in Willowwood. The trip was well organized and we had knowledgeable guides, particularly at the Burrell. There were good meals at various venues. At the House for an Art Lover restaurant even the main course was fittingly Mackintosh, a portion of delicious poussin, its pale pink, creamy sauce dotted with lentils like gesso beadwork. The italicized line that began my impressions was the first line of a possible poem. The poem might never get off the ground, but a concluding image is that signature small bird, a seagull maybe, high on the Mackintosh weather vane. We saw it more than once during our three day visit: black-wrought, against the blue enamelled sky.