Dame Elizabeth Blackadder's work is amongst the best loved of any of the major figures in Scottish art of the 20th century.

The superb draftsmanship and careful juxtaposition of elements in her nature-inspired still lives are both impressive and unassuming. But what we think we know about her is really the product of one important period in her output, dating from the late 1970s. There has been a much wider field of enquiry, as a major new Scottish National Gallery exhibition aims to show, to the enduring thread of Blackadder’s work than just the skilfully- realised, intricately placed flowers and cats for which she is so universally admired.

“There is stuff in the exhibition that will surprise people who think they know her work well. It’s been a revelation to me in many ways,” says Philip Long, senior curator at the National Gallery of Modern Art, soon to become the director of the V&A at Dundee, who suggested to his colleagues two years ago that Blackadder, whose career began in the early 1950s, was long overdue a major retrospective.

Born in 1931 in Falkirk to an engineering family who ran a successful foundry business, Blackadder studied at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art, before going on to teach (1956-86) at the latter. Originally influenced by the Edinburgh School of William Gillies, William MacTaggart and Ann Redpath (who brought the young Blackadder to the attention of the Arts Council in the early 1960s), Blackadder began to develop her own language, sculpting what was to be a lifelong fascination with her surroundings with her keen appetite for travel.

“Her experience of the world is quite wide. She’s lived in Edinburgh for most of her life, but travelled extensively,” says Long, who points to the artist’s fascination with Japan and the effect it had on her work from the 1980s. “She was an extremely talented student at ECA and won a number of travelling scholarships which produced some very impressive, tough drawings in chalk, pastel, black ink,” says Long, of the work Blackadder produced in response to the architecture and landscapes of Italy and Greece. “They are very different to the watercolours of the 1980s and 1990s, very different to what we are familiar with.”

The familiar watercolours, with their shallow pictorial plane, astonishing technical facility and intricately arranged objects, are, of course, well represented in an exhibition which charts in roughly chronological fashion Blackadder’s journey from student to mature painter, still very much active, as two specially commissioned films following the artist at work attest.

Married to fellow ECA graduate John Houston, Blackadder became interested in still life relatively early in her career. “There weren’t a great many opportunities in the 1950s in Edinburgh as an artist,” explains Long. “You either taught or you showed your work in the Royal Scottish Academy or the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts.”

Both Houston and Blackadder were taken on by the Scottish Gallery, crucially, early in their careers. Then the only commercial gallery in Edinburgh, it was the only way to get regular showings. Blackadder also showed with the Mercury Gallery in London. “She eased into a pattern of making paintings, drawings and prints, in demand from several galleries, and has carried on working in this way,” continues Long. “I think that’s partly why there haven’t been more substantial retrospective exhibitions.”

Paintings which Long thinks will surprise, even shock, those visitors familiar with Blackadder’s later work are her early 1960s watercolour Portuguese Still Life, and 1970s works Flowers And A Red Table and Indian Still Life. “In the 1960s, she was very much experimenting, with some quite surprising results. Portuguese Still Life shows an awareness of British Pop and Op art with strong colouring and graphic passages of paint, almost stylised, with its central still-life objects made almost unrecognisable through abstraction.” The Edinburgh School characteristics – taking inspiration from one’s surroundings – can still be seen in her work, but what she created was very different from the work of that school.

“By 1970, her work is really quite distinctive, her style confident, and this to me is when she found her artistic voice. She began to make work on a much larger scale – something else that might surprise those who think they know her – but her work remains inspired by her surroundings and the objects she has collected throughout her life.”

At 80, Blackadder continues to work at pace, and the final room of the exhibition is devoted to her current output. “She is a very private, modest, unassuming character,” reckons Long. “What marks her out as an artist is her extraordinary mastery which would be extremely difficult to replicate. The intuition and experience she’s built up over the years is deeply admirable.”

Elizabeth Blackadder is at The Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, from tomorrow until January 2. The artist will be in conversation with Philip Long in the Hawthorden Lecture Theatre tomorrow at 2pm.

www.nationalgalleries.org