Making a Dundee Icon: Steve Paterson and the Veneration of Jimmy Reid

By Anna Barlow

The first time Steve Paterson encountered Jimmy Reid, it was on a dog walk in Dundee. "It was a head that immediately struck you," he recalls, "like a landscape painter seeing Glencoe for the first time! He had a look of Caravaggio's St Peter about him, but he was 90 years old." That lucky encounter gave rise to one of Paterson's most compelling works: a bust of Reid in the form of St Joseph, patron saint of engineers.

Steve Paterson, St Joseph, left perspective, 2025, Bronze and Steel, height 55cm. Image courtesy of Steve Paterson.

Steve Paterson, St Joseph, frontal view, 2025, Bronze and Steel, 55cm. Image courtesy of Steve Paterson.

Paterson describes himself, with characteristic wit, as an “autodidact”, just like Jimmy Reid. "No amount of schooling ever taught a Paterson anything" — yet he had a formative artistic education nonetheless, one that encompassed him in museum visits and cultural spaces, with his head always buried in a reference book. Chief among his influences is William Lamb, whom he considers "one of the finest sculptors this country has produced." As a child, Paterson's father took him to Lamb's studio in Montrose, a town he remembered as 'dotted with his work’, an experience he described as 'sublime'.

Caravaggio, Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1601, Oil on canvas, 230 x 175cm. Public domain image.

This self-taught tradition runs deep. Lamb himself was taught by another great Scottish sculptor, James Pittendrigh MacGilvery, who in turn drew inspiration from Auguste Rodin. It is a lineage of self-forged mastery: Rodin, despite his extraordinary talent, was famously rejected from the Ècole des Beaux-Arts. In Paterson, we find a kindred spirit of sorts; an artist whose authority comes not from institutional tutelage, but from an organic, hard-won relationship with his craft.

In this way, Paterson reflects his shared pedagogical approach with Jimmy Reid through his sculpture.

William Lamb, Self Portrait, 1930, bronze, 36 x 25 x 22 cm. Image courtesy of Art UK.

Auguste Rodin, Bust of Jules Dalou, modelled 1883, cast 1925, Bronze, 52.7 x 40.6 x 17.8 cm. Image courtesy of The Rodin Museum.

For example, with no engineering qualifications, Jimmy Reid resourcefully learnt what he knew from a mechanic he had on payroll as a lorry driver, starting on small motorbike projects at just 16, which ultimately evolved into his role taken over from his father Mr James Reid Snr in 1969 ‘as a well-known figure in motor and food trades for more than 60 years’ in his company James Reid Limited. “Part of the business was originally a garage”, says Jimmy: “it was a case of necessity to keep the factory going, to keep the vehicles going, to keep me going.”

The same hands-on approach echoes in Paterson’s sculpting method. He works directly from his sitters, typically over four or five sessions and sees no need for preparatory drawings. "Sculpture with clay is just drawing in space", he says, "so I never really saw the point". This immediacy is not merely a method, but a personal artistic philosophy.

The discussion he had with Reid was as much part of the process as the clay itself. “The conversation between me and the subject during the course of the sitting kind of helps shape the piece", Paterson explains. He also incorporates objects that naturally emerge from that dialogue; artefacts that symbolise the weight of that exchange.

In the case of Jimmy Reid or St Joseph (2025), it was a chance mishap that proved decisive in its final form. Learning of Reid's engineering background mid-process, Paterson conceived the bust as a portrait of St Joseph. While cutting the base, he blunted the circular saw blade. Setting it aside, he looked back at the bust. "I thought, 'oh hold on…' — hence the halo". He reinterprets the blade, transforming it into a divine nimbus. In this way, Jimmy Reid is accurately sculpted into the Dundee “icon” he truly was.

Working in what he self-identifies as a "Scottish style of heavy marking making", Paterson's sculptures carry a gestural energy and a sense of expressive immediacy that make Reid's likeness instantly legible. The surface of the bust is fragmented, as if it were catching a fleeting moment of true reality rather than a false, fixed permanence.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Jesus of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, c.1630. Height 103cm. Image courtesy of San Sebastiano fuori le Maura.

In this, Paterson shares something with Wassily Kandinsky, who looked to music to animate his work with rhythm and dynamism, evoking a sense of the ‘real’. Paterson, too, emphasises the importance of music in the studio, and the result, despite the stillness of the clay and cast bronze as media, is that his works feel inhabited and alive. Where the sculptures of Italian Baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini are paragons of a pseudo-scientific anatomical precision, they can feel sealed and remote without a trace of the artist's hand. Paterson works differently, presenting the roughness and movement that is inherent to how we actually see one another.

The finished work pairs monochrome sculptural form with an ornate gold halo, a visual vocabulary of Baroque iconography applied to a contemporary figure. Jimmy Reid, aged ninety-one, is rendered with knowledge of the Scottish landscape and elevated from a familiar figure on a dog walk into something quasi-Divine — a saint of Dundee's own making.

St Joseph (2025) is a portrait; however, it is also an argument. The legacy of Jimmy Reid can be immortalised not through conventions of timeless idealisation, but through authenticity. On reflection of Steve Paterson's work, just thirty minutes away in Dundee, one can find our own contemporary Rodin of sorts: self-taught, spontaneous and possessed of a precious ability to evoke a true, living spirit in the sculpted human visage.

Bibliography

Artuk.org. "William Lamb (1893–1951), Self Portrait | Art UK," 2026. https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/william-lamb-18931951-self-portrait-261267.

Getsy, David J. "Material Evidence, the Gates of Hell and the Making of Rodin." In Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture, 73–132. Yale University Press, 2010.

Rodinmuseum.org. "Jules Dalou," 2026. https://rodinmuseum.org/collection/object/103440.

Steve Paterson Sculpture - Just the Hands. "About - Steve Paterson Sculpture," July 13, 2025. https://stevepaterson.co.uk/about/.

Turismo Roma. "The Basilica of San Sebastiano Outside the Walls," January 12, 2019. https://www.turismoroma.it/en/places/basilica-san-sebastiano-outside-walls.