Contemporary Art is one of Scotland's' more successful exports. Considering its size it is remarkable that so many artists have established themselves not only in the U.K., as a whole, but overseas as well, particularly the U.S.A.  Artists like Peter Howson, Steven Campbell, Jenny Saville, Stephen Conroy, Ken Currie and Alison Watt all have reputations that go much further than just Scotland.  However, their success is due in part to the long established tradition of painting in Scotland.

Scotland has only four colleges of Art; Edinburgh College of Art, Glasgow School of Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, and Grays School of Art in Aberdeen. Those of us living and working in the art world in Scotland can detect a certain "in house style" of each college but there is a link between them all which is an emphasis on their students being able to paint and draw with a high degree of skill and observation. Figure drawing forms a central core of the courses that are taught at these four colleges. This may seem a little out of fashion and it maybe a matter of opinion but I feel that an artist who cannot draw is like a musician who cannot read music. Of course there is always room for the true genius but that is a rare occurrence. However just because an artist has been taught to draw with great skill and observation it does not mean that they will produce representational work and I do not place that type of work over non-representational work. Nevertheless it is true to say that in recent years there has been a renaissance of figurative painting in the art world as a whole and consequently Scottish artists are well placed to feature at the forefront of this revival.

Scottish art today follows on from a tradition which started with a group of four Glasgow artists called the Scottish Colourists, Samuel John Peploe, Francis Boileau Caddell, George Leslie Hunter and John Duncan Fergusson. They were working at the turn of the century and producing work which could sit alongside the work of the Post Impressionist artists and be favourably compared. Much of the work that can be seen on this web site shows the influence of these artists and their fascination with colour and form.

Many of the artists working today would acknowledge that Joan Eardly was one of the greatest Scottish artists of the second half of this century and that her influence is extraordinarily far reaching. She was born in 1921 and died in 1963 but most of the work that she is best known for was produced in the last fourteen years of her life. Her paintings still have, today, an astounding resonance and power mainly due to the fact that they were firmly rooted in her "Scottishness". Her work is easily divided into two parts; the paintings of children of Glasgow and the landscapes and seascapes of the time she lived in a small East Coast fishing village called Catterline. Her paintings done at Catterline, in particular, show a passion for capturing the atmosphere of the Scottish landscape and she uses paint in a way which reveals the intensity of this passion. The surface of these paintings are a revelation in themselves, as the paint is applied in such an energetic and vigorous way. She would use other media apart from paint to achieve the desired result and in one particularly famous example actual flowers and plants are laid onto the surface. This of course is hardly unusual today but this was back in the 1950's when such techniques were new. This fascination with the surface of the painting is something that can be seen often today and I hope that some of this can be seen in the reproductions on this web site. However the best thing is to visit us in Perth.

The four colleges in Scotland each have their own web site which are worth having a look at:

Edinburgh College of Art; http://www.eca.ac.uk
Glasgow School of Art; http://www.gsa.ac.uk/
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art; http://www.dundee.ac.uk/fineart/degreeshows.html
Grays School of Art; http://www.rgu.ac.uk/subj/ats