Episode 4 The Story of Scottish Art

The Scottish landscape

has often been a place of inspiration and escape...

..but for one 20th-century artist, this small farm

in the Pentland Hills would become a refuge from the outside world.

He began transforming his tranquil surroundings into a work of art.

But look more closely and all your expectations are subverted

because what you encounter amidst the flowers is an art of conflict.

The work of Ian Hamilton Finlay assaults you with questions.

He challenges your perceptions of history,

your sense of order and disorder,

your very understanding of the term "civilisation".

But his work isn't just rooted in the Scottish landscape,

but in ideas.

Finlay's garden echoes the path taken by Scottish art

in the 20th century -

a period convulsed not only by physical violence

but by intellectual revolutions that redefined what art could be

and challenged what it actually means to be a Scottish artist...

..because in this period, more than ever,

those two words embody a conflicted identity.

Have we been most influenced by nationalism or internationalism,

by radical innovation or tradition?

During this century,

a period of collision, confusion and subversion,

Scottish artists were always to be found embroiled within

some of the most exciting, creative movements the world has ever seen.

In the early decades of the 20th century,

a group of artists and writers felt a growing sense

that something was missing in Scotland -

an authentic cultural identity.

What was needed was a renaissance,

the reawakening of a creatively distinct, modern Scottish art...

..art that looked not to the past but to the present

and took inspiration from Scotland's greatest engineering achievements -

the Forth Bridge and the great ships built on the Clyde.

And one artist in particular would attempt to forge a new

and very different vision for Scottish art.

William McCance was a man who defied conventions.

He didn't fight during the First World War

but was imprisoned as a conscientious objector.

A sense of violence,

trauma and rupture with the past would still permeate his work.

William McCance was fully aware

of all the artistic experiments in Cubism,

Futurism and Surrealism that were shaping the international art world.

And his own approach to the canvas was completely untypical

of anything that was happening in Scotland at the time.

As a man, McCance detested violence and yet, curiously,

his images have all the intense energy of a tightly-coiled spring.

He completely subverts what a canvas should look like.

Instead of simply having four edges,

he gives us this kind of awkward seven-sided picture plane.

Rather like the gun batteries,

which are so fiercely abstracted in this image,

it wants to make an impact.

It really wants to shatter all your preconceptions of what

Scottish art should look like.

It wants to blast apart its associations

with an imagery of sentiment and stereotype.

And McCance felt that if Scottish art could purge itself of all

those associations, if it could celebrate instead

the intellectual prowess, the engineering capabilities,

the independent spirit of a modern Scotland, then the nation

could trigger its own authentic and indigenous cultural revival.

McCance's sense of nationalism was encouraged by the poet

Hugh MacDiarmid - a founder member of the Scottish National Party.

MacDiarmid was the driving force behind calls for a Scottish

cultural renaissance and thought that Scotland's greatest minds

had become engineers, whereas art

was only practised by sentimentalists.

MacDiarmid believed McCance represented

the future of Scottish art.

What was William McCance doing that looked so exciting to MacDiarmid?

Well, in the early 1920s, more than any other Scottish artist,

McCance is looking at the latest developments in art,

interpreting them and making them his own.

So there's really nobody else painting works like

Heavy Structures In A Landscape Setting,

and I think that's what really excited MacDiarmid.

-It's an art that's really cutting with the past, then, as well?

-Yes.

He is concerned with modernity and contemporary life.

He's not looking to Scotland's history,

whether that's art history or any other kind of history.

It's very much about the now and an identifiably Scottish take

on things and celebration and a reinvigoration of Scottish culture.

And how did they think they could achieve that?

I think it's to do with considering Scotland to have

this wonderful nation of engineers but needing to move on from that

and to appreciate art in its own right,

so coming away from that almost industrial understanding

and achievement, to lose some sort of provincialism

and place Scottish culture in an international context.

Because McCance seems to be investigating

-more of a sort of machine-orientated world?

-That's right.

So we see it in works like his 1925 linocut,

The Engineer, His Wife And Family,

which is an extraordinarily radical image,

completely flat, completely stylised, quite hard to understand.

It's quite a brutal image

and it's reducing the human figure to a robotic form.

Because when you look at his work, even now, it feels radical,

it feels so unusually not Scottish at all.

I mean, it's throbbing with suppressed energy

and almost a sense of sinister energy and intent there.

I mean, it is extraordinary.

Many of McCance's images investigate the ever-growing impact

of the machine age.

But they also betray a growing feeling of uncertainty.

The year after McCance completed this drawing,

Fritz Lang's film Metropolis hit the picture houses.

In both works, we seem to look the future in the eye - a cold

robotic stare, a future that appears less than entirely benevolent.

By the end of the 1930s, in other parts of Europe,

concepts of national identity and cultural pride were being

warped and exploited for increasingly sinister reasons.

The concept of cultural nationalism, which McCance and MacDiarmid

had explored in a Scottish context, was about to be corrupted.

Mankind was once again about to unleash new forms

of destruction upon itself.

The creative fragmentation of Modernism was about to enter

the nuclear age.

When some artists awoke from this latest nightmare, it was

almost as if they had to teach themselves to paint all over again.

In the aftermath of the war, art underwent another regeneration.

And one of the great post-war developments would be a new type

of abstract painting.

It's often thought that Britain failed to play

much of a role in the struggle for post-war modern art,

that the revolution was spattered across the canvases of Continental

and American painting, but we had our revolutionaries, too.

A new generation of Scots emerged

who were going to care very little about ideas of Scottishness.

They were going to leave home, become part of a creative diaspora.

And the energy, the variety and the sheer violence of their work

was about to hit the British public right between the eyes.

These Scottish artists were bohemian and free-thinking.

They were international men of action

and their work would have a huge impact.

Scottish art had just got cool.

But 1950s Britain was still a place of economic and cultural rationing.

At the Festival of Britain in 1951, William Gear, one of the pioneers

of Scottish abstract painting, was awarded a £500 prize.

There was outrage.

Abstract art was perceived as a provocation,

the outburst of feral youth.

But if some people were incensed by Gear, then the work of another

Scottish artist would soon have them choking on their Spam.

Alan Davie was a true maverick.

After serving in the war,

he toured for a time as a professional saxophonist.

He was one of the first British artists to soak up the new style

of Abstract Expressionism pioneered in America

by the likes of Jackson Pollock.

Davie began improvising on canvas with the same kind of spontaneity

as the jazz musicians he loved.

Painting, for me,

is simply a kind of private, religious, meditative activity.

I'm conjuring up things which are beyond my comprehension

and anybody looking at these paintings afterwards

has to get into the same state.

And a good painting is the one which succeeds in getting

the spectator out of himself and into this universal, mystical state.

Ha!

Wow!

This is Sacrifice by Alan Davie and it's exactly the kind

of painting that was scaring the pants off the British public.

And imagery like this had not come out of Scotland before -

imagery that was so terribly abstracted that all you could do

was respond emotionally

because you can't really conceive of an intellectual definition

of what exactly is exploding out into your face.

He liked to think of himself almost as a shaman,

a sort of wizard who creates these portals out of which an enormous,

powerful, subconscious energy radiates out towards the viewer.

And it's a whole new way of creating powerful, emotional,

expressive, abstract painting that is no longer tied down

to any landscape, to any discernible, definable inspiration.

It is a kind of hallucination.

It's the expression of a new counterculture.

When Davie first exhibited in New York, Jackson Pollock

and Willem de Kooning, the kings of Abstract Expressionism,

fell in love with his work. The paintings sold out.

Scottish artists were making a mark...

..adding their own ingredients to a great bubbling pot

of international experimentation.

The cycle of artistic evolution was moving

so swiftly that it was getting hard to keep up, but at every

single regeneration, there seemed to be a Scot in the mix.

"You've never had it so good!"

Harold Macmillan told the nation in 1957.

But by then, people wanted to see some evidence.

Enough of all this post-war angst! Just bring us some bloody colour!

And there was one Scottish artist who was only too happy to oblige.

Eduardo Paolozzi was born in Leith,

the son of an Italian ice cream seller.

He was discharged from the Army after feigning madness.

In order to escape further military service, he enrolled at art school.

It was an inauspicious start.

But after the war, he spent two years in Paris.

Influenced by Surrealism, he started experimenting with collages

that he felt reflected contemporary culture.

Paolozzi had found his vocation.

Artists' studios give you a real insight into the way

their minds work.

Some of them are really tidy and some of them,

like this, are a kind of mulching compost heap for the imagination.

From the very start, Eduardo Paolozzi was inspired to challenge

the conventions of British art.

He amassed mountains of cuttings of images, fragments

of advertisements, figurines from Disney films, toys for children.

And he shocked the British public by insisting that the

imagery of popular culture could be recycled and repackaged as art.

In his hands, junk was a whole new palette that seemed to democratise

the creative process and ignited the fuse on the Pop Art movement.

Paolozzi rebelled against the Establishment,

lobbing his bombshells of colour and humour.

But he also made three-dimensional collages.

Like some highbrow rag-and-bone man, Paolozzi trawled scrapyards

for disused engine parts, breathing new life into what he found.

I mean, this is a kind of creative sacrilege, but I promise,

when you're standing in the company of St Sebastian I,

you're not spending time with a hunk of junk.

Eduardo Paolozzi has managed to engineer

a presence into something that's so obviously inanimate.

And you can admire it just for that poignant fact.

But this also represents a rebooting of religious iconography.

All those elegantly martyred saints...

Well, they've here been transformed into an ironman,

a robot that's malfunctioning with pain,

a ripped-open shriek of agony that's as powerful as anything

we've encountered in the history of sacred art.

Amidst all of this churning creative chaos,

there would also be moments of calm.

William Turnbull began his career working for DC Thomson in Dundee,

producing just the kind of Pop Art that his great friend

Paolozzi loved so much.

But the rest of his career seems to have been

a reaction against this kind of mass-produced imagery.

Turnbull is perhaps best known as a minimalist sculptor

but his experience as a pilot in the Second World War,

flying through vast reaches of sky and viewing the world

from a new perspective, would also inform his abstract paintings.

William Turnbull wanted his paintings to be

all about silence but that's the magic of abstract art -

it engages you as a viewer.

So I can choose to relate to this painting as a kind of Zen moment

of contemplation or perhaps I can hear in it

the echoes of that popular culture after all.

Is this the shrinking spot of a television screen being switched off

or perhaps the roaring afterburners of an Apollo mission to the moon?

These artists belong to a generation of creative exiles.

And the variety and impact of their work is staggering.

But whilst these young bucks took to the international limelight,

it begs the question - exactly what did they leave behind in Scotland?

In many ways, the answer was tradition.

And one of the outposts of this tradition was a grand country house

called Hospitalfield.

Students who had been recommended by Scotland's four art schools

would come here each summer to learn and create.

One of the most influential tutors here was a man called James Cowie.

Cowie's own paintings often told subtle stories,

reflecting on the heightened experiences of adolescence.

His work is lyrical

and steeped in the elegance of Italian Renaissance painting.

And during this period, Scotland's art schools continued to

nurture the practices and beliefs of an earlier era.

It was a way of teaching

that prized rigorously-controlled drawing,

colour and brushwork.

My father, Sandy, was also part of that lineage

and he handed down those lessons to me.

The work these artists produced was not radical.

Instead, they proudly upheld a tradition - a tradition full of

painterly confidence which looked to the Continent for its inspiration.

Theirs was not an art of subversion but of celebration and it,

too, has its place in the story of Scottish art.

And if you want to look hard at their images,

you'll find them to be full of intellectual engagement,

full of ideas, full of provocation

and even full of the kind of turmoil that any committed artist will

put into their work, whether they're painting a cesspit or a sunset.

One artist in particular, a former pupil at Hospitalfield,

would prove that a traditional training was no obstacle to

testing the boundaries of modern British art.

Her name was Joan Eardley.

Eardley was born in Sussex

but studied at the Glasgow School of Art

and her story would complicate and greatly enrich

the question of what it means to be a Scottish artist.

She developed her signature style

in one of Glasgow's most deprived areas - Townhead.

And there she became a familiar character, pushing around a pram

filled with painting equipment as she searched out her subjects.

Artists from Scotland had looked into the streets and into the

lives of ordinary people for their inspiration already

but Joan Eardley was going to match the gritty subject matter

with a formidably passionate approach to the canvas.

And her paintings were enormously important to me as I grew up

because in them you could recognise not only what Glasgow

looks like but also what it felt like.

And Joan was able to capture that because she spent

so much of her time out on the streets sketching,

noting down the people that she saw around her and the buildings,

like these, that stood in front of her.

And that was how she captured the people

and the places that would eventually live new lives on her canvases...

..the sooty tenement walls, the patches of graffiti,

shredded advertising hoardings.

Eardley is particularly renowned for her portraits of city children.

She documented their hard lives but also celebrated their spirit.

At the present moment, there's a family.

I've been painting them for about seven years, I should think.

For me, they were Glasgow, this sort of richness which Glasgow has,

I know that Glasgow has, I hope it always will have.

As children, Pat and Ann Samson were two of Eardley's favourite subjects.

Annie and Pat, it's a great privilege to me

-because I've known your faces through paintings all my life.

-Aye.

And I love Joan Eardley's work.

-So do you remember these early encounters?

-Oh, aye.

-She'd just be, like, "Come along." And it was like...

-Baby-sitting?

-..the Pied Piper!

-Aye!

-All the weans following Joan.

-And did you want to go?

-Aye, loved it.

Because we'd get thrupenny bit and a piece 'n' treacle.

-What, a sandwich with treacle in it?

-Yes! Back then, it was a luxury.

But she became, like, part of our family.

We were part of her family and she was part of ours.

And when she'd done these sketches of you, or drawings of you,

would you go and have a look at what she'd done that afternoon?

She used to give us them and we used to make aeroplanes out of them.

Go up the road and fire them.

And my ma used to burn the lot of them.

"Don't bring that rubbish into this hoose!"

-Yes!

-Your mother didn't like them?

It wasnae that she didn't like them, she just...

Because Joan was just an ordinary woman,

she wasnae famous or nothing when we knew her.

She actually described me, "Face round like a turnip,

"carrot-red hair and squinty eyes."

I had really bad squints and I think this appealed to Joan.

Even though the images aren't really photographic,

-you still feel the atmosphere?

-Yes, you do. Aye.

Because I just feel, the way she painted us,

I mean, she painted us, what she saw in us.

and I thought, "Well, that is just us."

That was us.

Because we were poor...

..and she just painted us as poor children.

Eardley made this adopted homeland her passion

and she searched for its soul not just in the grime,

but in the glory of its landscape.

'I feel it's important to know the people, to know buildings, or...

'And the same with landscape.

'I found that the more I know the place

'or the more I know the particular spot,

'the more I find to paint in that particular spot.'

Some of Eardley's most powerful paintings weren't created in Glasgow

but on the east coast, here in Catterline.

And in this wonderful landscape,

she began to create extraordinary paintings.

She would be pounding her canvas here

with the same kind of broiling energy

as the waves that come in off the North Sea

and hit the shores beneath the line of cottages

where she would make her home.

Joan Eardley knew how to pick her tones perfectly,

and when she froths up the canvas and the texture of the paint,

it's because she's been observing and feeling this landscape

for a protracted period of time with great intensity.

They feel, to me, to be some of her most personal images,

and they're also jam-packed full of joy.

This woman from Sussex embodies the painterliness

we've come to expect from a Scottish canvas.

She feels like a local.

Eardley died aged only 42.

And I have the sense that,

because the subjects and her career were so specific to Scotland,

her wider importance has been neglected.

She captures the spirit of a certain kind of Scottish landscape painting,

but she also marks the moment when there was a change in the winds,

when there was a new centrifuge in Scottish painting appearing,

when artists weren't looking any longer

towards the delicious, luscious, vibrantly coloured

painting traditions of the Continent,

and France in particular.

They were finding something peculiar and exciting

about the expressive anxiety of a more Northern tradition.

One artist in particular decided to take his inspiration

from the intense and expressive approach to the canvas

often associated with Scandinavia and Germany.

John Bellany would continue the brooding power

of Eardley's paintings

and he, too, would anchor himself within a local community.

John Bellany of "Bellany" as he's known locally,

was born here, in the village of Port Seton,

just outside of Edinburgh, and his father was a fisherman.

And the experience of belonging to this working community

informed his paintings for the whole of his life.

It endowed them with a sense of place,

a commitment to the lives of ordinary, working people,

and a Presbyterian directness.

So, in a painting like Allegory,

he takes a team of local fish-gutters

and he makes them witnesses of the Crucifixion.

He transports the community of Port Seton

and he makes an equivalence out of their lives

and the emotional turmoil of Christ's death.

And in so doing, he joins a long list of Scottish artists

who have told stories with pictures

and who have given a monumentality to everyday experience.

# Cauld winter was howling

# O'er moor and o'er mountain... #

Bellany's work acknowledges its debts to the great masters,

but it still feels powerfully original.

It's imagery that churns your stomach,

that keeps your mind ticking over, as well.

# When I met aboot daybreak... #

It's art that feels severe,

feels Scottish.

And it was fuelled by Bellany's religious upbringing.

# Asked me to show her the road tae Dundee... #

How important is faith to this community?

I would say strong. It's a strong faith that the people have here.

I have a strong faith.

It's a faith that I would say, most of the fishermen,

although they don't go to church, they still have a faith.

Do you think Bellany expresses that through his paintings?

He does express it through his paintings.

When he worked in the fish shop,

he would be standing, filleting, and the people that worked with him,

they were in the brethren, which is a close-knit community.

And they would be trying to mend his ways and educate him

about the sins of the world,

but John didn't seem to listen to this, like!

He survived it!

John, do you remember the day that you fell in the harbour

-when you were drunk?

-Yeah, I lost a fight there.

-The main thing is I got out!

-HE LAUGHS

# Turn your eyes, dear Lord

# Through the morning light

# The city of God... #

It sometimes seems to me as if, in every Scot,

there's a Calvinist just dying to get out.

We start to feel a little bit guilty if we indulge in too much fun,

too much...beauty.

John Bellany captured the life of this fishing community

from the inside.

But in his work, he liked to see himself as a bit of an outsider.

He turned his paintings away from the exuberant painterliness

that he associated with the Establishment,

and pushed it towards a more troubling and intense introspection.

But by the 1960s, art was undergoing an existential crisis.

As all the traditional definitions began to be overturned...

..the horizons of Scottish art were also being expanded.

Richard Demarco used the Edinburgh Festival

to bring controversial international artists to Scotland.

I couldn't care whether they're Japanese or English,

or whether they're Scottish, for that matter.

They're artists, and I believe they're good artists.

Strangely enough, I think this gallery is the only gallery

in Scotland prepared to...

to show work of this kind.

"Work of what kind?" People may ask.

Well, work where, in fact, you're going to get the ideas,

the thoughts, of some of the greatest minds of our time.

Increasingly, what mattered were ideas...

..the concept.

The artistic front line was now about performances and happenings

rather than choices of colour and brushstrokes.

Bruce McLean was the Scottish artist

who most provocatively embraced

the new possibilities of conceptual art.

He left Scotland in 1963 to enrol

at St Martin's School of Art in London.

Inspired by the spirit of creative freedom,

he abandoned conventional materials and formal techniques

and used his own body to poke fun at traditional notions

of what a sculpture should look like.

McLean believed he had the licence

to throw a roll of photographic paper onto a rocky outcrop on Arran

and call this a sculpture, a landscape.

Well, I thought that, um... people photographing the landscape

was just the same as painting the landscape,

so I thought I'll paint the landscape.

So, I got rows of photographic paper and I just painted the landscape.

I rubbed it, really.

But it was a sort of a... tongue-in-cheek joke about it.

But what I could never understand

was why it was called conceptual art.

I could never understand or work out what happened...

to art that WASN'T conceptual. I mean, you had to have an idea,

it's supposed to be about something, isn't it? Or is it?

Perhaps it isn't.

How did the people around you react

to the minimal things you were doing?

They didn't know what I was doing. Nobody had a clue what I was doing.

Doesn't really matter very much.

I used to make stuff by the pond in Barnes,

put bits of sculpture in the pond and floated it around,

and a man came down and said, "What are you doing?"

And I said, "I'm making a sculpture."

And he said, "Sculpture? It's a plastic brick in a pond."

I said, "It's moving around. It's a moving..."

He said, "Why don't you do something that looks like something?"

Anyway, a couple of weeks later, I found a mirror

and I was reflecting the landscape in the mirror.

And this bloke saw this and he thought

I had painted a landscape painting, he said, "Fantastic!"

I said, "No, it's a mirror." He said, "Oh, right, yeah..."

But, clearly, this was a radical shift.

I mean, the people who knew what art was up until this moment,

or at least what they had been told it was, were shocked.

But can I say something? I never thought I was making art.

I have to get that straight.

I always thought I was making propositions

for what sculpture could be.

I'm not sure I've actually made any decent sculpture.

But I always thought it was like a proposition.

And art is something which comes later.

"Art" is a three-letter word.

And I wanted four-letter words,

like "jazz", "punk", "pose", stuff like that.

But if you take that proposition to the extreme,

you're just coming out with the ideas,

is that not a bit nihilistic?

Do we not need to have something to interact with?

Well, I am interested in the energy.

I'm interested in the fact that something could be an action.

The whole reason to be in this area of activity,

it's not being some sort of bureaucrat.

Surely, you can behave badly and do exactly what you want,

push the boundaries of what is possible.

But you weren't sentimental about your Scottish heritage or identity?

-No.

-That didn't matter to you?

-No. I'm not a shortbread Scotsman.

I'm very Scottish, I go back to Malcolm VI

and Bertie, son of Malcolm VI in 1028,

and I have the book to prove it! No, no! And, um...

But I see myself as part of the world.

I think I'm an international artist.

But back home in Scotland,

the tradition of painting wasn't ready to die just yet.

In the 1980s, a new generation

of painters emerged.

They also considered themselves

to be "international artists",

but their national identity still shaped the work that they created.

Much of their imagery documented a Scotland

suffering from the collapse of its heavy industries

and in fierce conflict with the politics of the day.

The media opportunistically christened these artists

the "New Glasgow Boys", recalling the golden age

of Glasgow painters a century before.

And they would enjoy massive, international success.

MUSIC: Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus by Serge Gainsbourg

Not all of these artists, however,

chose to paint a picture of grim realism.

When I first saw Steven Campbell's work at an exhibition in Glasgow,

I was bewildered and thrilled.

Campbell's strange and surreal work

covered every inch of space

as Je T'aime played repeatedly on a loop.

He wrestled huge figures onto his canvases

as if he was trying to create a modern kind of history painting.

His paintings had attention-grabbing hoopla

and noisy existentialism.

There's supposed to be 150,000 artists in New York,

and when I went there three years ago,

everything was very nationalistic.

The Italians would just paint Italian,

the Germans and the French and the Belgians.

And they seemed to have a lot of culture and paintings to draw on,

whereas Scottish art doesn't seem

to have much in the way of the modern stuff.

So, I tried to invent a kind of modern Scottish art

using the landscape and waterfalls and moors and the fir trees,

use anything extremely Scottish,

and try doing it in a modern kind of way

so I could rival these people and stand close to them,

but still have a national identity.

Around the same time as the so-called "Glasgow Boys",

there also emerged a group of female artists.

They were less noisily celebrated,

but made work that was intensely original.

Alison Watt came to prominence in the late '80s

and continues to create paintings that threaten assumptions

about beauty and conventional symbolism.

I like to think of my work as Scottish.

I think, if I lived abroad or even lived in England,

I think, definitely, my colours would be different.

I think my colours reflect my surroundings.

It's very earthy colours that have surrounded me all the time,

so I think that's reflected in my work.

Marat And The Fishes is an image that seems to reverberate

with the memory of so many things that have been important

throughout the story of Scottish art.

You've got the clarity of line,

you've got this crisp, tonal control.

The sense that somebody wants to make an image

that is much more than just a reflection of reality.

This is a wistful and lyrical painting, which, in a sense,

might have been a reaction to all the angsty images

that were coming out of Glasgow in the mid to late 1980s.

It is very much of its moment.

But it is also deeply informed by the lessons of history.

And it's that combination of the local

and the wider narrative of art history

that I think helps you become a greater artist.

MUSIC: Wandering Star by Portishead

The exchange between personal vision

and the heritage of Scottish painting

would also electrify the work of Jenny Saville.

Saville was born in England, but went to art school in Scotland.

Her vast nudes subvert the painterly tradition

once associated with the Glasgow School of Art.

Her portraits are challenging and confrontational

and make you question accepted views of the female form.

Whatever size or type of woman you are,

you have to conform to these ideas of femininity,

and they're almost branded onto you,

like, when you're born, or dug into you.

I paint very traditionally, and I use the body quite traditionally,

and I wanted to almost cut through the tradition.

MUSIC: Fun 'N' Frenzy by Josef K

What? Saville and the Glasgow Boys were the artists

making all the noise when I was growing up.

But there was another factor filtering into my imagination

and affecting my perception of the world -

Glasgow itself.

Not just the school, but the city.

Like Scottish art, this was a city in flux,

where the '60s tower blocks that had once represented the future

now looked increasingly melancholy.

You know, the skyline of Glasgow is a great artistic statement

and it's defined by three things -

landscape, Victorian architecture and modernism.

And I remember, growing up here,

how I'd always catch sight of these great tower blocks

framed against the hills that encircle this city.

Now, you might think of them as ugly,

and they are, undoubtedly, difficult places to live in,

but their presence, and their gradual collapse,

was a formative influence in my generation.

They represented the kind of crumbling legacy

of post-war optimism,

and they were part of the everyday architectural context of our lives.

MUSIC: Lease Of Life by Errors

The sense of a city collapsing and regenerating

is reflected in the work of Toby Paterson.

He transforms the ruins of brutalist architecture

into creative springboards,

exploiting the freedom to work in different mediums

that today's artists enjoy.

I bloody-mindedly decided to look at buildings

everyone else despised,

and that goes right to the core of why I'm an artist

and why I work with what I work with.

I'm a painter, but I have an unerring interest in architecture.

I can't escape from it - literally, can't escape from it.

And I do think of myself now pretty much as a landscape painter

because I am experiencing and responding

to places, spaces, forms,

that I encounter visually.

But not always doing that with a paintbrush?

No, the outcome of that is...

Can take all sorts of forms, from a painting,

a watercolour on paper sometimes,

to right up to working with a string ensemble

on a collaborative performance in a semi-derelict building.

That is, I guess, the luxury of the contemporary artist.

You can roam freely in terms of the different ways

that you can map out your ideas.

STIRRING ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

I do feel like I've been very lucky to be part of a scene

and a situation in Glasgow

that is kind of...

I think, in the future,

will be looked back on as a sort of pivotal point.

SUBDUED ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

In his 1981 novel Lanark, the writer and artist Alasdair Gray wrote that,

"If a city hasn't been used by an artist,

"not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively."

But over the last few decades,

Glasgow, especially, has reimagined itself,

thanks largely to its ever-growing artistic community.

Old industrial buildings were gradually colonised

as cheap studios for artists and a do-it-yourself ethos flourished.

The increasingly elastic attitude to what the word "art" could mean

was embraced by Scottish art schools in the 1980s.

And over the last 20 years,

an exceptionally large number of artists associated with Glasgow

have featured in major contemporary art competitions.

Douglas Gordon...

..Christine Borland...

..and Martin Boyce are just some of those

who have won critical acclaim for their work.

Today, Scotland is internationally renowned

as a centre for contemporary art.

Some of it, might, at times, leave you scratching your head,

but the energy, and the sheer number of young hearts and thinkers

striving here to create their art

is undeniably a powerful force.

There's one thing for sure,

the story of Scottish art has come very far.

And today, there seem to be infinite numbers of ways to be an artist.

We can produce work in any medium,

we can explain our ideas in any kind of form.

So, it comes as a surprise to find that one

of the most sought-after contemporary Scottish artists

makes work that looks like this.

Paint on canvas.

Vibrant colour.

Peter Doig is one of the most acclaimed painters in the world.

His paintings sell at auction for tens of millions of pounds.

He was born in Edinburgh in 1959,

but left Scotland when he was a child,

grew up in Canada,

and now lives in the Caribbean - the setting for much of his work.

He is an artist nomad who cannot be defined by nationality.

But it seems to me, that the spiritual home of his art

is a place of uncertainty and angst.

And this tension between exuberance and unsettling introspection

feels somehow...familiar.

It's a tension that has defined

so much of the story of Scottish art during the last century.

So, do you have any memories at all of Scotland?

I have a lot of memories of Scotland

because I travelled to Scotland a lot when I was young.

Almost every year, I would spend summers in Scotland.

The landscape itself was quite...

Yeah, quite Gothic and quite scary for a youngster, in a way.

Do you think that identity, nationality,

plays any real role in the work that you create today?

I don't know about identity,

but I think where one's spent time certainly does.

So, do you think it's possible, today,

for an artist to be committed

to try and paint within one national tradition?

Does it exist? Is it irrelevant to think that way?

I can't really think of an interesting one who does!

I mean, to be honest, I think...

I think everyone's influenced by - yes, where they come from -

but I think nationalistic art is not so interesting, really.

Because I think people move around so much,

and I think, you know,

especially since the advent of the internet,

you can be working in Scotland

and your work can be seen in...

wherever, you know, worldwide,

and that goes for people working around the globe now.

I think it has really changed a lot.

I mean, I can identify one European, Scottish, French train of painting

that affects what I do and sometimes that's a real comfort.

I know where I'm coming from. That never bothers you in any way?

Not really, no. No.

"Who do we think we are?" seems to be the question of our time.

And I think that across the last century,

our willingness to respond with many different answers

has been a vital characteristic of Scottish art.

The reason that the art of Scotland

continues to be relevant and exciting

is because Scottish artists have always refused

to be imprisoned by our borders.

Scots have always had to be comfortable

with multiple identities.

You've got Scottish, British, European, immigrant...

But I don't actually believe that art is the by-product

of any particular nationality.

What is Scottish art?

It's a mongrel. It's a hybrid!

If I were to define it as one thing, it would slip between my fingers

and transform itself into something completely different.

The art of Scotland has its own particular accent.

It has been coloured by our history and our landscape.

But it has always participated

in an international exchange of inspiration.

And it just so happens that some of the most extraordinary examples

of artistry were imagined here

where the European Continent tumbles into the Atlantic.

The memorial cairn at Aignish

has loomed over the Hebrides for 20 years.

It was designed by the contemporary artist Will Maclean,

a poignant reminder of the struggle by local crofters

to be allowed to work their land.

But what I find most powerful about this structure

is that it echoes something even older and more epic...

..because on the opposite shore of the Isle of Lewis

are a series of stone monoliths whose purpose is much more obscure.

We began our story of Scottish art

surrounded by ancient standing stones,

and here we are

encountering them again.

These stones at Callanish were sunk into the soil

almost 5,000 years ago,

but they remain objects that defy simple explanation

and instead, they liberate our imagination,

and that's what Scottish art has been doing ever since.

Scottish art has been shaped by religion...

..by politics,

by war, poetry,

and love.

But mostly, it has been shaped by the motivation that drives artists

wherever they come from, that what they do isn't a useless indulgence,

that art exists to convince every succeeding generation

that there ARE things more beautiful, more precious,

even more powerful than life itself.

In Scotland, we've been carving,

sculpting, painting

and crafting works of art for thousands of years.

And these artworks don't just matter because they're a Scottish story,

they matter because the sheer power,

the poignancy and brilliance of the human imagination

ensures that they're part of your story, too.

The people that raised these stones,

they had no real idea of "art".

They certainly had no concept of a nation called "Scotland".

But they very obviously had an aesthetic -

a dynamic sense of the architecture of space.

And from this point in history,

from this awesome springboard,

Scottish artists have gone out into the world,

they've evolved, they've been nourished by ideas of nationhood,

by their conscience, by their humanity.

They've mixed it with some of the most important artistic traditions

humanity has ever seen,

and they have never stopped inspiring, seducing,

and liberating our imaginations.