Art & Industry brings together artists past and present who have all found inspiration in the industrial landscape of northern Britain.
Artists include: Frederick Austin | David Cook | Kate Downie | Robert Eadie | Lachlan Goudie | Ernest Burnett Hood | David McClure | Michael McVeigh
Frederick Austin was a British painter, etcher, and engraver. Austin studied at Leicester College of Art and RCA. For his work Flight into Egypt, he won the Prix de Rome in 1927, five years after his brother Robert Sargeant Austin had done before him in 1922. In his early career, he gained influence and inspiration from his brother, but over time an individual style emerged more modernist in outlook. In his printed works, religious subject matter is recurring, as well as inspiration from medieval sources. Together with his brother, Austin was one of the few original printmakers to continue with traditional printmaking techniques after World War II. He exhibited widely including the RA and RE. Austin’s work is held in several public collections including the Ashmolean and V&A.
Cook was born in 1957 in Dunfermline and attended Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee from 1979-84. He was recognised early as an exceptional talent, winning the first prize at the annual student show at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1983. He then won a travel award which took him to Paris, Amsterdam, Belgium and Cyprus. He won the Guthrie Award at the RSA in 1985 and was given Scottish Arts Council Awards in 1985, 1988 and 1989. He has exhibited irregularly but notably at The Traverse Theatre in 1982 and with the 369 Gallery throughout the following decade.
In the 1990s he was already visiting Seagreens (his current home) and staying at a cottage at Benholm, two miles to the North also frequented by Alberto Morocco and Ian Eadie. Cook travelled regularly in these years to Turkey, the Balearics and significantly, at the invitation of the Everard Reed Gallery, to Southern Africa for three months in 1997. He was able to secure the tenancy at Seagreens shortly after his return and eventually bought it in 2004. This sense of belonging is now deeply embedded; he can see the seasons change and paint the whole calendar; the daffodils of Spring, wild flowers of Summer, the Autumn skies and bleak drama of Winter are all on show: immediate, raw and compelling.
Robert Eadie was born in Glasgow in 1877 and studied at the Glasgow School of Art, as well as Munich and Paris. An elegant portraitists, book illustrator and rural and town landscape in oils and water-colours. He was also an engraver, and artist in black and white. His soon garnered attention and he was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts and before 1914 also at the Paris Salon. Eadie also exhibited at the Royal Academy, London and the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh. He was also a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, where he also frequently exhibited. He was prominent in civic life and was elected president of Glasgow Art Club. As an illustrator of books he illustrated “The Face of Glasgow”, published in 1938 and and “The Face of Edinburgh”, published in 1938. More recently his paintings also preface “The University of Glasgow Library: Friendly Shelves”, 2016.
Ernest Burnett Hood was born in Edinburgh and studied at the Glasgow School of Art where he became closely affiliated with William and Mary Armour. Following a period on the staff of GSA he worked as a full-time painter concentrating on Glasgow scenes, across painting and printmaking. He was a keen member of Glasgow Art Club and a lifelong friend of Alexander Goudie. He is best known for his oils and watercolours of industrial landscapes and topographical scenes. He exhibited with the Royal Scottish Academy between 1956-1972.
David McClure was one of the outstanding Scottish painters of the post-war generation. He emerged from Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1950s alongside a remarkable group of artists including James Cumming, William Baillie, John Houston, Elizabeth Blackadder and David Michie. Together, they helped shape what became known as the Edinburgh School: a generation defined by strong draughtsmanship, expressive colour and a renewed confidence in painting.
McClure’s early career developed within an exceptionally rich artistic climate. Edinburgh was home to influential teachers and exhibiting societies, while The Scottish Gallery was presenting the work of established figures such as Anne Redpath, William Gillies and William MacTaggart, alongside younger artists including Joan Eardley and Robin Philipson. McClure soon joined this company, holding his first solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery in 1957.
Travel played a vital role in the formation of his mature style. Following a year spent painting in Florence and Sicily, McClure absorbed the colour, light and structure of Mediterranean painting, qualities that remained central to his work. By the late 1950s he was teaching at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee alongside his close friend Alberto Morrocco, contributing to the college’s reputation as one of Scotland’s great centres of painting.
Throughout the 1960s McClure was included in important surveys of contemporary Scottish art, helping to define the character and ambition of the Edinburgh School. His 1969 Edinburgh Festival exhibition at The Scottish Gallery marked a high point in his relationship with the Gallery and confirmed his position as one of the leading painters of his generation.
McClure’s work is distinguished by its luminous colour, patterned surfaces and intimate subject matter. Still lifes, interiors, landscapes and family scenes are transformed through a rich painterly language that balances observation with imagination. His paintings remain deeply admired for their warmth, intelligence and unmistakable sense of joy in the act of painting.
The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1957, 1962, 1966, 1969 Festival Exhibition, 1989, 1992, 1994, 1996 70th Birthday Exhibition, 2000 Memorial Exhibition, 2003, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2022.
Michael McVeigh was born in 1957 in the post-war council estate of Lochee, Dundee located on the north west of the city, one of five children. He left school with no formal qualifications; however he wanted to be an artist and so began, unannounced, going to classes at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, his presence being challenged eventually. James Morrison, then one of the lecturers, formalised his position and accepted him as a full-time student based only on his outstanding drawings and painting.
Since moving to Edinburgh in 1982 McVeigh became a familiar figure seen regularly working in the city and until a few years ago as a street artist. Life as a street artist brought a certain amount of unwanted celebrity status, especially in recent years, becoming a cult figure sought out by the city’s stag and hen parties, eventually having to limit tourists to ‘one photo only’.
Michael McVeigh is a modern day folk artist who depicts the world around him. He is a participant observer who has created a naïve and sophisticated setting for contemporary life and history. There is something of the medieval chronicler about him; he draws and paints what is there, and what is worth depicting because it is an essential, occasionally quirky, part of human existence.
His works are held in both public and private collections including town halls, pubs, fishmongers and a number of municipal and national institutions.
Bruce Thomson – or ‘Adam B’, as he was often called – was a painter of great integrity whose long, productive life tells the story of Scottish painting for the first three quarters the twentieth century. Thomson was born in 1885, attending first the Trustees Academy and then the newly established Edinburgh College of Art where he received diplomas in both Drawing and Painting, and Architecture before scholarships took him abroad to Spain and then Paris.
He was an accomplished etcher and lithographer and he also sought expertise in the difficult media of pastel and watercolour. By the 1920s, his technique was closest to S.J. Peploe, Cadell and other contemporaries favouring the technique of painting on a gesso ground with an oil-reduced vehicle so the subjects tended to be treated in flat areas of colour.
Thomson served in the Great War before returning to the College where he taught etching, composition and still life to the painting school and colour theory to the architecture students. His association with Edinburgh College of Art continued until his death as, although he retired from teaching in 1950, he continued as an examiner and a Trustee. His links with both the RSA, where he was Treasurer for seven years and the RSW, where he served as President for a further seven years from 1957 were very important to him. He was awarded an OBE in 1963. In 2024 the City Art Centre in Edinburgh held a major retrospective of his work, The Quiet Path, his first major exhibition in a public institution.
Aleksander Żyw was one of the most important émigré painters to settle in Scotland during the twentieth century, bringing to post-war Scottish art a distinctive European modernism shaped by war, exile and a lifelong engagement with the Mediterranean world. Born in Lida, Poland, in 1905, he moved to Warsaw as a child and enrolled at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts in 1926, where he received a rigorous academic training grounded in drawing and traditional painting techniques.
A travel bursary awarded in the 1930s transformed the direction of his life and work. Extensive journeys through southern Europe, particularly along the Mediterranean coast, awakened an enduring fascination with colour, light and landscape. By 1934 Żyw had settled in Paris, where he absorbed the influence of Impressionism and the wider currents of European modernism while establishing his own studio practice.
The outbreak of the Second World War dramatically interrupted this promising early career. Stranded in Corsica when war was declared, Żyw returned to mainland France to enlist in the re-forming Polish Army under General Sikorski. Following the collapse of France, he escaped through Spain and Portugal before eventually arriving in Scotland, where Polish forces regrouped during the war years. Appointed an official war artist, he produced powerful sketches and drawings documenting military life, naval convoys, bomber stations and wartime Edinburgh. These works remain among the most compelling artistic records of the Polish wartime experience in Britain.
The war proved a decisive catalyst in Żyw’s artistic development. The discipline of continual sketching and direct observation enabled him to move beyond naturalism towards a more subjective and emotionally charged visual language. By the late 1940s and 1950s, his paintings had evolved into richly textured compositions in which figuration, symbolism and abstraction coexist. Works such as Neptune’s Court, Dark Halo and Red Still Life reveal an artist deeply engaged with colour, structure and the expressive possibilities of paint itself.
After the war, Żyw married a Scot and settled in Edinburgh, where he became an influential presence within the city’s artistic life for more than two decades. During this period, he exhibited regularly with The Scottish Gallery, which held his first one-man exhibition in 1945 and continued to champion his work throughout his career. His relationship with The Gallery formed a central part of his Scottish legacy, introducing audiences to a painter whose outlook remained profoundly international while contributing significantly to the development of post-war Scottish modernism.
The Scottish Gallery continued to celebrate Żyw’s achievement through important later exhibitions, including Aleksander Żyw (1905–1995): Paintings and Drawings in 2012 and Before & After in November 2020. His work was also the subject of major retrospectives organised by the Scottish Arts Council in 1972 and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1986.
In the 1970s Żyw moved permanently to Tuscany, where he and his wife established an olive farm near Castagneto Carducci. The final decades of his career saw another transformation in his work, as he developed luminous, semi-abstract paintings rooted in close observation of the natural world. Though increasingly abstract in appearance, these late paintings were grounded in an intense study of landscape, light and organic form. He continued to paint until his death in Tuscany in 1995.
Today Aleksander Żyw is recognised as a singular figure within twentieth-century European and Scottish art: a painter whose work bridged cultures, histories and artistic traditions, and whose remarkable career was profoundly shaped by exile, resilience and reinvention.
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