Studio Practice and the Persistence of Glasgow Figuration in Post-Pandemic Work

By the Contemporary Scottish Painting Editorial Team

The post-pandemic recovery of Scottish figurative painting has produced a distinct generational moment in Glasgow studio practice, one that warrants closer documentation than it has received in the existing literature. The studio cohort that emerged from the Glasgow School of Art between 2018 and 2022 has produced a body of figurative work that combines several inheritances in ways that distinguish it from both the Glasgow Boys tradition and the New Glasgow Boys revival of the 1980s.

Three characteristics define the cohort.

The first is a return to direct observational practice from the model, often in long sessions extending across multiple studio visits, in deliberate contrast to the photograph-based working methods that dominated figurative painting in the 2000s and 2010s. The decision is methodological rather than ideological. Practitioners describe the choice as a response to the perceptual flatness they associate with photographic source material, particularly after extended periods of pandemic-era screen mediation. The longer sessions produce surfaces that record the painter's perceptual adjustment over time rather than fixing a single optical moment.

The second is a willingness to incorporate compositional inheritances from the Scottish Colourists and from the post-war Glasgow figurative tradition (Joan Eardley, Alberto Morrocco, John Bellany) without falling into pastiche. The compositional vocabulary is recognizable. The handling is contemporary. The synthesis works because the painters are using the historical vocabulary as structure rather than as surface citation. The result reads as continuity rather than appropriation.

The third is a structural commitment to the Glasgow studio as a working community. The cohort has clustered in shared studio buildings across the East End and Calton, sharing models, organizing internal critique sessions, and maintaining a working relationship with the city's smaller galleries that has stabilized exhibition opportunities outside the dominant London market. The community structure has produced a body of work that develops in dialogue, which shows in shared concerns across the cohort's recent exhibitions.

The institutional reception has lagged the work. Major UK survey exhibitions have not yet caught up with the cohort, and Scottish national institutions have been slow to acquire from the group at scale. The result is a body of work that is widely respected within the Glasgow community and underrepresented in the broader institutional record.

The historiographic risk is that the cohort gets folded into existing narratives (Glasgow figuration as continuous tradition, post-pandemic figurative revival as global trend) without close attention to what is distinctive about the methodological commitments. The work rewards close looking. The methodological choices (direct observation, long sessions, structural inheritance, community practice) constitute a coherent position that deserves articulation on its own terms.

Future scholarship should document the cohort while the studios remain active and the working memory of the methodological decisions remains accessible to interviewers. The next decade will determine whether this moment becomes a documented chapter in Scottish art history or a residual presence in the studios of a single generation. The work is strong enough to warrant the former. The institutional follow-through has not yet caught up.