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Exhibited:
Modern Masters XI, March 2020 – The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; Modern Masters XVI, January 2024 – The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
John Houston was the foremost expressionist landscape painter of his generation. He used colour in a direct, emotional way to engage with the subconscious. His great subject is the Forth Estuary, initially from the Fife side, often depicting the fields and birds rising from hedgerows above the sea, observed walking near his home in Buckhaven. And later, when his home was in Edinburgh, he painted north and east, from Gullane and North Berwick in all media, times of year and weather. The Bass Rock became a recurring motif, the great basalt plug once the home of prisoners, now just the home of gannets and kittiwakes. Like Mt. St. Victoire near Aix for Cézanne, Houston found limitless inspiration from this ever-changing locale, the subtlest pale of snow over water or, as here, the full drama of rock, sea and sunset.
John Houston was brought up in Buckhaven in Fife, where the ever-changing light over the Forth estuary and fields falling away to the shoreline were the backdrop to an idyllic childhood of horse fairs, golf and football. The landscape eventually inspired him to become a painter. Houston was drawn into the fold of Edinburgh College of Art and became as prodigious and natural a painter as his mentor William Gillies. He travelled widely, making exhibitions after trips to Europe, Japan and America, always with his fellow artist, wife and soul-mate Elizabeth Blackadder. He was an expressionist who could evoke the subtle, particular character of place, but his vision and ambition always looked outward. John Houston was represented by The Scottish Gallery from the late 1950s. He was ten times a solo exhibitor at The Edinburgh International Festival, between 1961 and his last show in 2008. Houston was honoured with a major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2005. His work is held in numerous public collections. We are actively looking for artwork by John Houston. If you have any works you are interested in selling please contact The Gallery.
The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1960, 1962 (Festival), 1965, 1967 (Festival), 1971 (Festival), 1975, 1980, 1990, 1993, 1997, 2003 (Festival), 2007 (Festival), 2009 (Memorial), 2012, 2013
Click here to view prints by this artist.
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