This November we have brought together several vintage and contemporary artists for whom printmaking has been or is vital to their studio practice.

For our summer exhibition programme, we present a variety of 20th century and contemporary Scottish printmaking. Included are examples by William Armour, Robert Colquhoun, Ian Fleming, Peter & Linda Green, Calum McClure, Robert MacBryde, Alison McGill, William Scott and William Wilson. Gallery artist and British art specialist

Click here to listen to Davy Brown, discusses the two prints by Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde in a special podcast which gives a fascinating insight into their work.

William Armour

Born: 1903

Died: 1979

Born in Dumfriesshire, William Armour was the son of Hugh Armour and husband of Mary Armour. He attended Glasgow School of Art between 12918 & 1923 under Maurice Greiffenhagen and joined the staff of the school in 1947. He became head of drawing in 1955 and retired in 1957. who exhibited between 1929 and 1940. He showed 24 works at the Royal Scottish Academy, 3 at the Glasgow Institute and 5 at the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours.

Robert Colquhoun

Born: 1914

Place of Birth: Kilmarnock

Died: 1962

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), subsequently winning a travelling scholarship to France and Italy 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. Following this success – post 1951 saw The Roberts, as they were known to their friends, fall in a sharp decline into a life of poverty. Robert Colquhoun died in 1962.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1944 Colquhoun & MacBryde participate in Paintings by British and French Artists, Lefevre Gallery, London and which also tours to Aitken Dott & Son (The Scottish Gallery), Edinburgh. The Roberts, 2010 Golden Years, 2014 The Roberts, Revisited, 2017

Click here to see original works by Robert Colquhoun.

Ian Fleming

Born: 1906

Died: 1994

Ian Fleming was born in Glasgow in 1906 and studied at Glasgow School of Art during the 1920s. He began printmaking at art school, where his skill was quickly noticed, with Glasgow Art Gallery purchasing two of his prints while he was still a student. He joined the staff at Glasgow School of Art in 1931 and soon met the Edinburgh-based printmaker William Wilson through their mutual acquaintance Adam Bruce Thomson. Wilson and Fleming struck up an important friendship, sharing views on printmaking technique and subjects, their influence on each other was of mutual benefit to both their practices. During his time at Glasgow School of Art Fleming painted a portrait of the two Roberts – Colquhoun and Macbryde – who were his students at the time (alongside a young Joan Eardley). During the War, Fleming served first as a reserve policeman before joining the Pioneer Corps seeing action in France, the Low Countries and Germany. He left the Army in 1946 as an Acting Major and returned briefly to Glasgow before taking up the position of Warden at Hospitalfield, Arbroath, succeeding the artist, James Cowie. The fishing towns of Angus and Kincardineshire were to be his inspiration for many paintings of this period in which he celebrated the colour, forms and architecture of the working harbour communities. In 1954, he relocated to Aberdeen as Principal of Gray’s School of Art but continued to pursue his painting practice alongside his academic commitments. He was elected a full Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1956, and by the time of his death was the longest-established member. After retiring in 1971, he became one of the founding members of Peacock Printmakers in Aberdeen, alongside Frances Walker.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1947, 1987

Peter and Linda Green

Born in 1933, Peter Green OBE, RE, studied at Brighton College of Art and the Institute of Education University of London Having qualified as a teacher he initially taught at a secondary school in East London where he established a thriving school printing press, producing small books and original prints. During this time he developed his own work as a printmaker and was elected to membership of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in 1958.

Linda is a self-taught printmaker. Her initial interest in the visual arts began following a period as a senior administrator at the Hornsey College of Art followed by over 20 years as Registrar in the Faculty of Art and Design at Middlesex University. In collaboration with her husband Peter she has developed a range of direct relief printing processes, without using a press, including a method of paper cut stencils which she now uses in her own printmaking. Her work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Mall Galleries and Bankside Gallery in London.

For the last few years, Peter and Linda have worked collaboratively in their process.

Calum McClure

Born: 1987

Calum McClure was born in 1987 and graduated in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art in 2010. He was the winner of the 2011 Jolomo Painting Award, has had five successful exhibitions with The Scottish Gallery and was an invited artist at the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy in London in 2012. Recently he has been included in an exhibition of prints at the Royal Academy, London; had work in the major Scottish art societies’ annual exhibitions; had work exhibited at the RA Summer Exhibition; won a prize at the inaugural W Gordon Smith Award for painting; and most recently exhibited two pieces with Flowers Gallery, London.

McClure is a painter who immerses himself in the landscape and in the artistic process of representing it. He understands how paint can convey the poetry of suggestion and is absorbed in the infinite possibilities of the medium. His work evokes atmospheres, especially through the representation of light, shadow and reflections. Some of his images are almost abstract, others quite clearly representational, produced from intense scrutiny of details in the landscape and vistas, views from particular vantage points all with their possibility for further imaginative exploration. He is an artist who dreams as he sees and concentrates deeply as he paints, enabling others who view his work to be transported in a similar way. The images are positive, beautiful and lyrical, those of a precious environment to be nurtured and celebrated.

Robert MacBryde

Born: 1913

Place of Birth: Maybole, Ayrshire

Died: 1966

Robert MacBryde was a still life and figurative painter and a theatre set designer. Born in Maybole, he came from a poor working class family and worked in a shoe factory before gaining a place at Glasgow School of Art (1932-37). At art school he met fellow painter Robert Colquhoun, with whom he established a life long relationship and jointly they became known as ‘The Two Roberts’. They moved to London in 1939 and MacBryde had his first solo exhibition at the Reid & Lefevre Gallery in 1943.

Robert Colquhoun died of heart failure in 1962. Soon after MacBryde moved to Ireland, and for a time shared a house with Patrick Kavanagh, Robert MacBryde died in 1966 in Dublin as a result of a street accident.

Click here to view paintings by this artist

Alison McGill

Born: 1974

Alison McGill has always looked with a weather eye on the world around her, immersed in the particular beauty of the natural world revealed by the coincidences of each day. She was initially inspired by the earth seen from above and she developed a technique with pigment and paraffin wax which best represented the drying crust of the earth’s surface, its mineral colours and sweeping fault lines.

Since then Alison’s viewpoint has descended and as her mastery of her medium has developed to embrace new atmospheric subtleties; she can shift from the universal and abstract to the particular character of place, which is the motif of the landscape painter. Her work is still subject to interpretation and her concerns are far from topographical but we can walk with her and look at eye-level at the place where land and sea meet the sky.

Alison is a regular exhibitor at Society and Commercial Gallery group exhibitions throughout the UK and has been showing with the Scottish Gallery since 1997. Her works are held in Private and Public Collections worldwide.

To view paintings by this artist, click here.

William Scott

Born: 1913

Place of Birth: Greenock,Scotland

Died: 1989

William Scott was a British artist born in Greenock. In 1928 he attended the Belfast School of Art before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy school in 1931, initially studying sculpture, he subsequently moved to the painting department. Scott spent a number of years living and working in France and Italy before the outbreak of the Second World War where he served with the Royal Ordinance Survey and learned lithography with the Royal Engineers. His career as an exhibiting artist took him across the world, meeting the Abstract Expressionists in New York in the early 1950s and representing Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1958. His work sits between abstraction and figuration – rooted in the European tradition, with themes of landscape, still life and the female nude.

His work is held in public collections in the United Kingdom and Ireland as well as the United States of America.

William Wilson

Born: 1905

Place of Birth: Edinburgh

Died: 1972

Like many of the significant Scottish artists of the 20th century, William Wilson was not satisfied with the restrictions of one medium, but focused his energies on three.

Throughout his life he fixed intently on each in turn, etching, watercolour painting and latterly stained glass design, which brought him an international reputation. However, it is his work in etching, made between 1925 and 1940 which is arguably his most powerful and successful work, and a unique contribution to Scottish art history. Whilst the previous generation of Scottish etchers, DY Cameron and James McBey, had been primarily concerned with the documentation of landscape and atmospheric effect, Wilson’s interest lay in the structural qualities of an image, often realised through architectural subjects; relishing the angular juxtapositions of roof, wall and landscape. Wilson’s draughtsmanship is superb, his line as suggestive as Eric Gill and his tonality in a tradition that goes back to Samuel Palmer and Rembrandt. His etchings are visually rich and suffused with atmosphere and represent a body of work to match McBey and Cameron.

Past & Present Print Masters

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