Prue Leith extols the weaving skills of Archie Brennan

Who would have thought that a bodybuilder and ex-holder of the Mr Scotland title would also be one of Scotland’s greatest artists and one of the world’s best weavers? I’ve admired the work of Archie Brennan (1931-2019) since the early 1970s when I saw him on TV weaving a tapestry of Brendan Foster breasting the marathon tape. It was hypnotising, like watching a Chinese chef spinning noodles.

I was hooked as he explained how he’d designed the image – by using the pixels of the newspaper photograph he was copying. I contacted the BBC and tracked him down to Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh where he was the director and master weaver. My husband and I commissioned a tapestry from him – it became one of his At a Window series and I’ve been a fan, of him and of Dovecot, ever since.

If Brennan had been a painter he’d have been a lot more famous, but his heart and soul were in weaving and it didn’t bother him that tapestry was then considered a minor craft. He simply set about reinvigorating it, inspiring his weavers at Dovecot and his students worldwide to let their personality, creativity and imagination play a part and to stop thinking of themselves as skilled copyists but as artists. Under Brennan’s direction, Dovecot worked with top modern painters such as Graham Sutherland and John Piper. Eduardo Paolozzi’s Mickey Mouse and Brennan’s own portraits of Princess Diana and Mohammed Ali are enthralling works in the pop art vein.

You can’t put Brennan in a box. Sometimes it’s pop, sometimes almost surreal trompe l’oeil, sometimes semi-abstract, but always engaging and beautiful. His technical skill is astonishing too, and, for me, the fact that his works are textiles lends a warmth and depth to them, which I love.

Weavers the world over (Brennan lived in Australia, Papua New Guinea and America) owe him a huge debt. We now know that tapestry is not all knights in armour and ladies surrounded by mille-fleurs. It’s not just his consummate skill, it’s that indefinable thing – part beauty, part meaning, part magic – that makes your heart beat faster.