John Houston
Until November 13; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

This year has seen a few big birthdays. First there was Ian Hamilton Finlay at 80. We’ve just seen Richard Demarco’s 75th, and the latest grand old man to join the birthday party is John Houston at 75. Houston, born in Fife and resident in Edinburgh for the last 50 years, is part of a continuum in Scottish art. Having learned from such luminaries as William Gillies, he has spent the last 50 years forging his own artistic path, while also teaching a new generation of painters at Edinburgh College of Art.

Francis Bacon – the last artist to adorn the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s walls – is an exceptionally hard act to follow. Compared with the dense intensity of that show, Houston’s retrospective seems only to skim the surface. Perhaps this can be accounted for by the paucity of works borrowed from public and private collections.

Of nearly 60 paintings, all but 11 come straight from Houston’s own collection. To compound the problem of supply and demand, a second Houston retrospective opens tomorrow at the Scottish Gallery, which has represented the artist throughout his career.

At first sight, the SNGMA’s exhibition could be mistaken for a collection of works by several different artists. The early work, made on a student trip to Italy, reveals the rigorously structural approach to painting (arguably more akin to the Glasgow tradition of painting) which Houston learned at Edinburgh College of Art from Robert Henderson Blyth.

Then, with Village Under The Cliffs of 1962, Houston’s paintings take on a life of their own. The previously stark compositions are exploded into a blaze of textured colour echoing the Abstract Expressionism of Willem de Kooning in New York. Evening Sky Over The Bass Rock of two years later, with its wildly striped sky, pays clear homage to Norwegian Expressionist Edvard Munch.

Houston moved further towards abstraction until in 1975, with Night Sky, Harris, he’d pushed it as far as it would go. The deep, textural watercolour, in swathes of grey on black, has lost its anchor in the physical world and in a way so did Houston. Faced with the rise of Conceptualism, the painter lost confidence in his painting, and when his muse returned in the late 70s it was with a distinctly Monet-like seascape.

The largest room in the gallery presents a further conundrum. The styles of Kandinsky and Bellany peek through Houston’s paint, as he responds to various stimuli in the 1980s. The simple horizon line is the glue that binds his works together, a device which Houston made his own.

Moving into the last 15 years, the stylistic experiments of earlier years begin to pay dividends. Grand Canal Series No. 8 captures the essence of Venice, its ornate architecture rising up around the rippling waterways. Houston’s interpretation, almost a tartan, evokes the verticals and horizontals without losing its link to the elements.

It’s clear from all his canvases that Houston habitually resists the easy route. Sometimes he allows himself the luxury of a smooth, loaded paintbrush, but more often than not his brush is dry and thinly loaded, scithering over the surface, or thinly wet, dripping down the canvas. There are short, buzzing marks like bees caught in net curtains, and curling ones like flies in a tizzy.

Two little paintings, made so recently that they’re too late for the catalogue, show Houston’s continued exploration of nature’s colourful patterns. Crashing waves are somehow readable in a wild zigzag of blue and turquoise, and an east coast landscape is recreated as a multicoloured tapestry of stripes. These are good signs of things to come.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 09.10.05