If you have been watching the excellent Story of Scottish Art series on BBC2 Scotland (the last one airs this Wednesday), you may have been struck by the fact that storytelling lies at the heart of presenter Lachlan Goudie’s narrative about how the art of our small nation has evolved.

The story stretches way back to Neolithic times. Like their counterparts around the world, Scotland’s artists have attempted to carve the world around them into a visual form. But even the Reformation and the disapproving eyes of John Knox couldn't dampen our artists’ appetite for the little telling details which – centuries later – paint a vivid picture of how life used to look.

There were some telling bouts of propaganda built into the story.

Strip away the layers of Scotland’s wild romantic landscape as depicted by Victorian artists such as Edwin Landseer and Horatio McCulloch, and you discover a people living in dire poverty. Or worse. Cleared off their land by distant landowners to make way for sheep.

According to artist, Neil Macdonald, co-organiser of Allusion, a new exhibition at Glasgow’s RGI Kelly Gallery, storytelling has a long lineage in the history of Scottish art. He explains: “From the dramatic subjects of Gavin Hamilton, the rustic scenes of David Wilkie, the subtle story-telling of the Glasgow Boys and on to the New Glasgow Boys, we still have a wealth of artists whose vision could be considered part of strong narrative tradition.. “Whereas earlier artists were more explicit and left less to interpretation, the paintings in this new exhibition of work by elected RGIs invites more personal response, with clues sometimes being found in the title of the work. Any authoritative meaning is often deliberately buried. You are invited to read your own narratives into the often beguiling artwork of this exhibition.”

The Royal Glasgow Institute for the Fine Arts – or RGI as it’s more commonly known – has a very colourful story of its own to tell. This august art institute has been operating in Glasgow since 1861 (when almost 40,000 people flocked to see its annual exhibition on a ‘working man’s ticket) and has counted among its number Glasgow Boys and Scottish Colourists alike. More recently, powerhouses of Scottish painting such as David Donaldson, James Robertson and Lachlan Goudie’s father, Alexander Goudie, have been ‘elected RGIs’. This peer-led honour is still highly regarded in Scottish artistic circles.

Until a couple of years ago, the RGI Annual Exhibition was a fixture in the Scottish art calendar, providing a showcase for the work of elected RGI’s and Scottish artists across the board, whose work had to go through a rigorous selection process before being displayed.

The last big RGI exhibition was held in 2013 at its traditional home of the McLellan Galleries on Sauchiehall Street, but organisers have not been able to stage ‘the annual’ for the last couple of years. According to RGI Honorary Secretary, Jacqueline Orr, this temporary hiatus will end next year. “Plans are already afoot to stage the 2016 annual exhibition,” she explains.

To fill the gap, Allusion and another complimentary exhibition, Connections, at the nearby Glasgow Art Club on Bath Street, conspire to showcase the RGI ethos of quality and diversity.

Allusion has been organised by husband and wife team, Neil Macdonald and Alice McMurrough. The couple were both elected as RGIs in 2012 and are among 15 RGIs who have work on show.

McMurrough explained: “We have a really strong mix on show, with work from newly elected RGI’s such as Adrian Wisznieski, June Carey, Helen Flockhart, Peter Thomson and Heather Nevay, to artists who have been associated with the RGI for a longer period. These artists include; James Cosgrove, Neil Macpherson, Gordon Mitchell, James Cosgrove, Ronnie Forbes and Willie Rodger.”

You won’t find any romantic scenes of highland hills and glens in Allusion. Although, in keeping with the title, there may be the odd reference, particularly from the brush of Neil Macpherson, who lives in Caithness.

He has two paintings on show, The Sojourn of Somerled and An Old Song, which are as vivid in terms of content as they are in colour. Macpherson’s work references Gaelic song, Norse legend, myths of the north, marks on the land, past lives, the changing seasons with long winter nights and endless summer light.

Macpherson, like so-called ‘New Glasgow Boy’, Adrian Wisznieski, saturates his canvases in colour-soaked lyricism. Wisznieski’s calling card is the poetic figure – like a character trapped in a never-ending story. Yet each one – on show here we have Man with a Sausage – there is also humour and bathos.

One of the recurring motifs in this exhibition is the use of colour and pattern; be it the shapes made by crowds of people placed around a sandcastle in Willie Rodger’s wonderful conte drawing, Sandcastle, or the warp and weft of Helen Flockhart’s mesmeric Eiderdown, which sets a naked female figure adrift in a bed of acidic greens and yellows.

Both artists work in completely different ways but there is a rigour to both Rodger and Flockhart’s work which is mixed up with a dream-like quality. You are pulled smack-bang into its beating heart.

In Flockhart’s Eiderdown and in Yellow Room (on display in the window), light, colour and pattern collide to tell the story. It’s the smallest picture in the gallery but it packs the biggest punch.

June Carey’s La Luna is part painting, part religious icon, in appearance and in content. There’s a divided self motif which recurs time and time again in Carey’s work and she sets a goddess like figure at the centre of this work to great effect.

I stood for an age in front of Peter Thomson’s Melancholic Rattle working out my own story. It’s daytime. We’re in a living room with four figures a male and a female who sit together yet apart. There’s a toddler on the other side of a large coffee table and a train passing outside a large set of patio doors. Source of the melancholic rattle perhaps?

In the foreground, a red-haired teenager lies slumped against a table. A mobile phone on the carpet. Has Peter Thomson been in my house?

Another cracker comes from the other-worldly brush of Glasgow girl, Heather Nevay, who creates post-Renaissance modern myths based around the power of children on the cusp of adolescence.

The Tryall is influenced by the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and links it to the hysteria which can flare up within any group of adolescent girls whichever era they belong to. Nevay’s style is shifting subtly all the time with more acidic blues, greens and yellows sneaking into her palette.

There are 26 works on show in Allusion and every single one has the power to hold you in its grasp. Job done, I’d say.

Allusion: An exhibition of 15 elected RGIs whose work celebrates the narrative tradition, RGI Kelly Gallery, 118 Douglas Street, Glasgow, G2 4ET, 0141 248 6386, www.royalglasgowinstitute.org Until 14 November