Review: Alasdair Gray's illustrations reveal a true master in the gallery

Walker is pictured not on his inexorable rise but in his inevitable fall. This week, at the age of 75, his creator continues to ascend: and Gray the writer must feel that Gray the artist is getting his due. An essential room of his artworks has just opened at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and the long awaited visual monograph (an autobiography in pictures rather than a critical survey) Alasdair Gray, A Life in Pictures is published by Canongate after almost a quarter century of anticipation.

Further afield, in Nottingham, Gray is part of the British Art Show. The four-yearly survey of all that is hip and happening in contemporary art is flexible enough to encompass an artist who is curiously ageless. His earliest works made him seem like an old man, yet even his most recent creations still reflect the passions and obsession of his childhood and adolescence.

The extensive survey of his graphic works at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Gray Stuff, draws on the collection of the National Library of Scotland and of works held by or loaned to his Glasgow art dealer Sorcha Dallas.

It can be hard across the generations and the entrenched silos of the art forms to pay due respect. But in many years of journalism, I've rarely met a Scottish artist who hasn't been dazzled or inspired by the work of the man that writer Ali Smith describes as a "necessary genius".

There was Lanark, the novel that in 1981 displayed his sheer untrammelled brilliance as a writer and came like an unexpected salve to ease the pain of life under Thatcherism. Then the lifestyle, that deep dedication to role-playing the life of the artist, the intense friendships, the dark nights of the soul, the bonhomie and bitterness of the Glasgow pub.

More seriously there was the interplay between the printed word and image, a conjunction that sits so well in a country with a Presbyterian suspicion of all but the written word, a country which nurses its deep but distrusted passion for the visual like a morose alcoholic nursing a pint.

Above all it was Gray's injunction to live imaginatively in your own time and place that served as inspiration in the hard times and example in the good. In countless bedsits and tenement garrets I've scanned the shelves to catch a glimpse of Lanark or Unlikely Stories, Mostly. Scotland's most outstanding contemporary artist, Douglas Gordon, loves to tell the story of getting on the train to London clutching his copy of The Fall Of Kelvin Walker, archly and self-knowingly reprising the role.

If his ongoing murals and his portraits are the most obvious big statements of his artistic abilities, it's in Gray's graphic works that his contributions are the most distinctive. Of all the current celebrations, it's in the book and at the Talbot Rice that you should get the best chance to unpick what makes him tick: the interplay between word and sign, the entirely non-linear attitude to time and place, the simultaneous urge to communicate and befuddle.

Gray's "illustrations" or "designs" for his books are not add-ons, but like the typography, the marginalia, the indices and the errata, an essential part of the great machine of his literature.

That role is there from the very beginning of this show, in the display of the frontispieces to each of Lanark's four volumes. Their direct sources are in those great printed works that bridge both art and science, the hierarchical world view of the medieval mind with the investigative vigour of the modern: books like Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan and Francis Bacon's Novum Organum.

When Gray chooses to fuse the latter's image of the Pillars of Hercules with a Glasgow streetscape and a tsunami that owes debts to both Hokusai's Great Wave and Leonardo's Deluge, we know he means business. It's a reference to a perpetual motif in his most important writings: the permeable border between one world and the next. But it's also a clear sign that he meant Lanark to smash through conventional wisdom. Eclectic is far too passive a word for creativity that is this voracious and ambitious.

If Lanark blazed like a new comet, then Unlikely Stories, Mostly remains Gray's most sublime marriage of word and image. The displays dedicated to this set of short stories show how he uses images to nurture and nudge his writing and how he borrows from bedfellows as unlikely as William Blake, EH Shepard and Paul Klee.

If there is a complaint about the show, it is that many of the works on loan from the NLS are mounted and necessarily framed. Whilst conservation concerns might dictate such an approach, it rather squashes the sense of the drawings as working tools and as ever-expanding art works in themselves. Gray's methodology as a thinker and as a designer is one of layers and accretions, notes and additions, a line or an idea that goes for a walk beyond the boundary of the page or the frame.

It is in the loan of his notebooks and ledgers, and a cabinet display of unframed drawings and designs, that we come closest to that sense of creation and self-creation. Teetering on the edge of chaos, you see that Gray is also an artist of exquisite control. In these best moments the show reveals that the writer and image-maker is, above all, the author of his own image.• Gray Stuff: Designs for Books and Posters is at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until 11 December. A room of his work is also on display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, until 23 January. A Life In Pictures is published by Canongate.