Curator pays tribute to Houston

Philip Long, senior curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, pays tribute to artist John Houston, who has died aged 77.

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John Houston, who has died at the age of 77 in Edinburgh on the 27 September, was renowned for his bold, expressionistic painting of the Scottish landscape.

Philip Long is senior curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

He contributed greatly to Scottish art and cultural life for over 50 years, through his own work and his long commitment as a teacher to several generations of students at Edinburgh College of Art.

Houston was born in Fife in 1930 and began as a student at Edinburgh College of Art in 1948, where his tutors included William Gillies and Robert Henderson Blyth.

In 1953, on a travelling scholarship, Houston went to Italy (with fellow graduate David Michie) where he was impressed by early Italian Renaissance painting, and in particular by its formalised treatment of the distinctive local landscape.

He will be remembered and greatly missed as one of the most original interpreters of the Scottish landscape of the 20th Century, as well as for his modesty and gentle charm

In consequent works such as the artist's Village under the Cliffs, an important early painting from 1962, Houston developed an approach to picture making where a simple compositional structure, based on direct observation of the natural world, would provide an underlying framework for a more abstract experimentation with paint.

This set the tone for much of his subsequent art, and while he experimented with other motifs, such as the figure and still life, the landscape, and especially that of Scotland, proved a constant source of inspiration.

Houston began his teaching career at Edinburgh College of Art in 1955, and in the following year married fellow artist Elizabeth Blackadder.

Edinburgh was their home, but together they travelled extensively. In 1969 Houston was artist in residence at the Prairie School, Wisconsin, where the monotonous horizon and broad sky further simplified his compositional approach.

International artist

During the 1970s his confidence as a painter was shaken by the dominance of conceptual art, but by the end of that decade he set to work with renewed energy, producing land and seascapes often grand in scale and dazzling in colour and form.

Such paintings were a highlight of the annual exhibitions of the Royal Scottish Academy and the artist's many exhibitions in Edinburgh, London and internationally.

A retrospective was held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2005, this featured his sketch books, filled with delicate observations of the countryside under different climatic conditions.

From these, Houston developed finished paintings which went far beyond a simple representation of his original subject matter.

He will be remembered and greatly missed as one of the most original interpreters of the Scottish landscape of the 20th Century, as well as for his modesty and gentle charm.