John Bellany was born in 1942 in the Scottish fishing village of Port Seton. He attended Edinburgh College of Art from 1960 to 1965 and the Royal College of Art from 1965 to 1968. His early work in Northern European Expressionist-Realist tradition allied to personal symbolism and iconography, often drawn from his family’s sea-faring past.
His work is often highly challenging and at times autobiographical as epitomised by a series of brutally unflinching self portraits produced in hospital following a liver transplant in the 1980s. He is considered an artist of international standing, with works in both MOMA and Metropolitan Museum in New York as well as the Tate Gallery, London. He was elected to the Royal Academicians in 1991. In 2016 the National Galleries Scotland hosted a major retrospective of his work to mark the artist’s 70th birthday.
I have enjoyed taking familiar images down a transitional path from representation toward abstraction.
Brown studied at Glasgow School of Art 1963-8, where he subsequently taught. He worked as the Director of Arts at many Scottish schools, latterly at the Edinburgh Academy. He now paints full-time and is a long-standing exhibitor at RSW, RSA and RGI, winning many awards including the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Association Residency, which formed the basis of his 2011 exhibition. His work is characterised by a rich and vibrant palette and varied use of oil, mixed media and collage. His subjects are often based on particular foreign travel, and previous shows at The Scottish Gallery have included works influenced by trips to Venice, Kerala and Mekong and Cuba. Most recently his works have been inspired by the cycle of growth and regeneration of his garden in Edinburgh. His next exhibition at The Scottish Gallery will take place in the autumn of 2023.
Please click here to view Robert Colquhoun’s prints
Robert Colquhoun was born in 1914 to working class parents from Kilmarnock, Ayrshire. His art teacher, James Lyle, helped him win a scholarship to Glasgow School of Art (1933-1937), and he then won a travelling scholarship to France and Italy along with his lifelong friend, lover and companion, Robert MacBryde with whom he is largely associated. Solo exhibitions under the guidance of Duncan MacDonald at the Lefevre Gallery on Bond Street were sell out sensations and the phrase ‘The Golden Boys of Bond Street’ was coined. During this high period, Colquhoun and MacBryde showed in The Scottish Gallery, 1944, British & French Artists. He later became a master of the monotype technique as he slowly moved away from the canvas. Success post 1951 saw The Roberts, as they were known to their friends, fall into a sharp decline into a life of poverty. Robert Colquhoun died in 1962.
There is an enduring fascination for Joan Eardley far beyond her unconventional life and early death at the age of forty-two. Born in 1921 in Sussex, Joan Eardley’s family moved to Scotland in 1939 and a year later she joined the Glasgow School of Art. She found subjects in the shipyards of Clydebank and the slums of Townhead, at first the run-down tenements and buildings and later the children and streetlife around Rottenrow where the character of the people and the place became the vital subject of her work. Her art education was finished with scholarship visits to Paris and the cities of Renaissance Italy and back in Scotland she ventured with her art school friends to Arran and back to the south of France. By the fifties, Joan Eardley divided her life between her studio in Townhead and the fishing village of Catterline, a place she had discovered in the North East of Scotland. Eardley felt at ease in these two contrasting localities and over the succeeding decade, as if by accident, she created an epic vision of the world from no more than two streets and one small fishing hamlet. The slums of Townhead are no more, the harsh realities memorialised by the honesty of her vision, the spirit of the people invested in its children captured, enduring like no other example in the history of art. Catterline remains unchanged and the village is inevitably a place of pilgrimage for the thousands who admire the artist’s deep-felt engagement with nature on the Kincardineshire coast. The Scottish Gallery held its first Joan Eardley exhibition in 1961 and later her memorial in 1964.
Ewan McClure is not a new artist but rather one who has honed his skills and sought new subjects and inspiration, quietly building his reputation and repertoire over the years. He was a student at Gray’s School of Art in the late nineties where Gordon Bryce, another brilliant technician, was an inspiration. Along the way he has gathered many accolades and collectors and his participation in the BP Portrait Award has brought him considerable national attention. He is a painter deeply connected to the history of belle peinture and if he recalls any single Scottish painter it is Samuel John Peploe, in his early period: the given of brilliant draughtsmanship, the understanding, and respect for the medium, the confidence to eschew the conventional but without relying on contrivance.
McClure’s work hangs in private and public collections including The Robert Fleming collection, Princeton Theological Seminary and The Royal Scottish Academy.
James Morrison sadly passed away in 2020. He was a great painter and a huge part of The Scottish Gallery for more than sixty years, the last thirty under an exclusive arrangement. His kindness, generosity and loyalty made him a hugely rewarding friend, and it has been a privilege to represent one of Scotland’s most distinctive and brilliant painters.
Born in Glasgow in 1932, Morrison studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1950-4. After a brief spell in Catterline in the early 1960s, Morrison settled in Montrose in 1965, joining the staff of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee the same year. He resigned from Duncan of Jordanstone in 1987 to paint full-time and since then his work has been exclusively available through The Scottish Gallery. Whole-heartedly a landscape painter, his main working areas are the lush, highly-managed farmland around his home in Angus and the rugged wildness of west coast Assynt. As well as Scotland, Morrison has had extended painting trips to Africa, France, and Canada, including three trips to the Arctic in the 1990s. A suite of his Arctic paintings were recently acquired and exhibited as part of a major exhibition, Among the Polar Ice at The McManus in Dundee (September 2019 – March 2020).
James Morrison first exhibited with The Gallery in the fifties. In June 2022, The Scottish Gallery celebrated the life and work of one of Scotland’s most-loved artists in a major retrospective show James Morrison A Celebration 1932 – 2020. The exhibition, held two years after his death, presented work from the entirety of his artistic career which spanned seven decades. A new exhibition Under a Northern Sky opens in The Gallery in April 2024. This show will contain a remarkable collection of Morrison’s Scottish subjects, many drawn from private collections.
Geoff Uglow is a British painter, born in 1978 in Cornwall. He studied at Falmouth and graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2000. He became a Rome Scholar in 2002 living and working in the illustrious British School at Rome for two years. He remained in Italy for a further two years before returning to his permanent studio on the dramatic coast of the south west peninsula of Cornwall. He won the prestigious Alastair Salvesen Art Scholarship for painting and travel in 2009 and used his time to journey around the coastline of Scotland in the footsteps of famous eighteenth-century painter William Daniell. This body of work was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. He has exhibited both in the UK and internationally, has won numerous awards and his paintings are held in both public and private collections worldwide. The artist currently works between his home and studio in Cornwall and in Italy.
Uglow looks to nature for inspiration. Out of the turbulent depths of a life lived, he gives harbour to fleeting moments of perceived beauty, in contemplation of painting. And then, into the eddy and flow of wet on wet colour by way of brush or hand, he emulsifies a fathomless feeling with impressions of light and air and motion. These paintings exude a visceral current, forcing the viewer to experience all six degrees of freedom. There is a warmth and generosity in his approach and his practice holds a message of promise.
The artist often diarises the passing year with painted colour notes expressing the passage of the seasons by pinning the essence of a particular day. Other major projects have included his Quercus series, using the oak tree as a vehicle to chart the changing rhythms, cycles and seasons of the British landscape. Uglow also finds his subject in his rose garden, which he had cultivated from seed. He describes each painting as ‘a handwritten letter, a moment, which can suspend disbelief, a fragment of vanished beauty.’
The Scottish Gallery has represented Geoff Uglow since the late 2000s and we are hosting a major presentation of his work as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2024. Beyond the Clouds will include works from a series made in Edinburgh both past and present as well as Italian landscapes, Rose Garden and Seascapes.