There’s a figure on Alasdair Gray’s cover for Lanark, his 1981 masterwork, which causes eerie feelings in my sister and I. One of four heads aligned at the bottom of the allegorical illustration depicts a tousle-haired man, bony-faced, moustachioed, and serious, that bears an uncanny resemblance to our father as he would have looked then. Of course the question of whether it was him, spotted trudging around soot-caked streets is moot, but there’s something about Gray’s work and its presence in Scotland, and in particular Glasgow, that feels as though it is the consciousness of a people.

Gray, who died 29 December, aged 85, was born into a working-class family in a newly built council estate in Riddrie, and attended Glasgow School of Art on a scholarship in the 1950s. Developing twin practices as a writer and an artist, his early working life was a mix of commissions for paintings and murals supported by stints as a schoolteacher. Even as a ‘world famous’ novelist, Gray never got rich, but lived decently enough in one of Glasgow’s incredible sandstone tenements, his painting gear set up in the front window for all to see.

Gray’s visual work ranged from illustrations for books, including his own, to large scale murals, with a visionary quality and strong line derived from William Blake and Aubrey Beardsley. Much of his work is allegorical and mystic, although the portraits are more straightforwardly graphic. Despite this, they are deeply perceptive and full of character, such as those found in and around the Ubiquitous Chip restaurant and pub, which make heroes out of its various punters across a thirty-year period.

‘If a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively’ says a character in Lanark, and to a certain extent this is exactly what Gray achieved. Lanark’s twin narratives, a bildungsroman loosely based on Gray’s awkward coming of age, and a fantastical science fiction narrative based in Glasgow’s hell-twin Unthank, make a protagonist of the once imperial-rich, then municipally ambitious city, laid low by deindustrialisation and without a story of its own to tell. In a way, this project is reminiscent of James Joyce and his distant characterisations of Dublin, but Gray never imposed exile upon himself.

With public fame also came a public voice, and in later years Gray became a prominent exponent of the small-nation nationalism associated with the Scottish independence movement. Like many Scots, his nationalism came from an old-fashioned municipal socialism, with an initially almost unquestioned belief in the Labour Party as the prime vehicle for Scottish workers’ interests, especially as the 1980s saw a Conservative government with no mandate in Scotland destroy its industries and use it as a testing ground for the Poll Tax. Gray was typical of a Scottish left that abandoned Labour during the (overwhelmingly Scottish) New Labour ascendancy, and channelled its energies into the independence movement and SNP.

‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’ is a Gray epigram that has been subsequently cast into the concrete of the bomb-blast walls of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, and although a paraphrase of Canadian poet Dennis Lee, it is quintessentially Gray’s. It is of course pithy and inspiring, subsuming nationalism within a broad utopian collectivity. Gray wrote a number of books on independence, and was a major contributor to the public debate, going as far as designing the cover of the Sunday Herald that endorsed the Yes vote in the 2014 referendum. But it’s always a difficult act to maintain the innocence of nationalist sentiment, and relying on there always being a big bully next door can negate the necessary self-consciousness that prevents ideological sclerosis. Scotland’s failure to warm to the strongest opportunity for the British left in decades might be taken as an unlearned lesson. When Gray wrote an essay in 2012 criticising careerist English appointees to Scottish arts jobs as ‘colonisers’, he was both in a narrow sense right, but also guilty of the tone-deafness that besets ‘plucky-little Scotland’ stories.

When Hillhead, his local underground station, was refurbished in 2012, Gray was commissioned to prepare a mural for one of its walls. Seeing it for the first time, I was struck by a difference in attitude in the city. Just a few years earlier, Glasgow had paid over £70 million for a new building to house its Transport Museum, and had chosen a throwaway design by global superstar Zaha Hadid over any local offerings, a situation which suggested a deep insecurity. The mural would have cost just a few percent of that figure at most, but in recognising that they had a world talent right there and letting Gray do his work, they showed more pride and confidence in their own selves than you could imagine.