Leading artist sees change on horizon

ONE of Scotland’s best known figurative artists, Adrian Wiszniewski, who has this week opened an extensive exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh, is embarking on a new artistic mission – to paint landscapes without any people.

The Open Eye show, entitled The Night Gardener, features colourful paintings with figures, and they may be the artist’s last paintings for a while in this style, as he plans a new set of works inspired by journeys in rural Scotland and New Zealand.

The works, to be shown in Glasgow in November, will be free of people, Wiszniewski said, and represent a “new thread in my work”.

He has toured New Zealand and is to travel the West Highland Way to find inspiration.

Wisniewski said: “I’m interested in why Scottish landscape painting looks the way it does, because these things didn’t happen in isolation – it involved the politics of the day, too.”