By Teddy Jamieson

Alan Davie, arguably Scotland's greatest living painter and surely Scotland's oldest living great painter (even 83-year-old Craigie Aitchison is six years younger than him) lives in the south of England. Deep England you might say. A place of village greens and fetes and country pubs slumbering in the summer heat.

He has lived here, in a reconstituted 18th-century stable, for five decades now, and yet the heat-hazed sopor of the place has yet to worm its way into his work or life. Maybe his beard isn't as full as it once was, maybe time has deepened the tracery of lines on his forehead and arms into tracks, but he remains perpetually in motion. "Every morning I have a walk. I also have an exercise bike so I can keep myself fit," he tells me, the perfume of the east of Scotland still evident in his accent. More importantly, he works every day, painting, drawing, making marks on paper. "Even when I'm looking at television I very often have a pad and paper and a pen and I'm doing drawings." Age, he says, seems to have had no effect on his output at all. "In fact, I'm probably more productive now than I've ever been."

On the wall of his studio are his latest paintings, fresh vivid bursts of colour and line, word and symbol. You can see in them traces of surrealism, pop art, outsider art, abstract expressionism, primitive art (we are also surrounded by his collection of Balinese shadow theatre puppets and African face masks), but these images are also sui generis, utterly, immediately Davie-esque. On his worktop there are drawings, pen and ink scribbles, dozens and dozens of them - intense, hypnotic, obsessive patterns on paper. He leafs through them almost dismissively. "I just can't stop. It's a relentless urge. The same as making music," he says, his eyes glancing over at the Bechstein piano across the room, a piano he will play for us before we leave. "I've got to make music at some time in the day and I've got to paint and draw."

He is still in fine nick for 89. He says his spinal joints are eroding and it's getting harder to stand up to paint or constantly change the paintings on the wall as he likes to do. But he'll carry on doing both until it's physically beyond him. In conversation he's a little deaf and occasionally drifts off into the odd fugue (although that might be a subtle ploy to avoid questions he's not much taken with). But for the most part he is lucid and sharp. "I don't feel old at all really. My problem is I'm absent-minded and forgetful, that's the main thing."

Some might say the same about Scotland towards one of its great talents. Is Davie known enough in his native land? He should be. Age and ability have ensured that Davie's is one of the great stories of Scottish 20th-century art. The son of an artist father, he manned an anti-aircraft battery during the second world war, jammed with Ronnie Scott and Johnny Dankworth in Soho, played in swing bands, was discovered by Peggy Guggenheim, went to the pub with Jackson Pollock, flew gliders, drove E-Type Jaguars, shaved his pet pooch for Lord Snowdon's lens. And he painted a bit too, 4000 paintings he says, every one catalogued and recorded, every one an excursion into what we might call Davie World, a pullulating dreamscape of snakes and gods and swirling shapes given titles such as Gigantic Feather Machine. Painting, he says, is an adventure into the unknown. "They say art is a matter of self-expression.

I don't think it's self-expression at all. It's finding something beyond one's self. Explaining myself isn't worth doing."

Oh well, let's try anyway. When you look at your own paintings, Alan, can you see your own biography? "I don't think so. The painting doesn't seem to reflect anything of my own particular physical life at all."

Everyday life began in Grangemouth in 1920, his father teaching art for a living.

"He studied at Glasgow Art School before the first world war. He always encouraged me. If friends came in he'd say sit and I'll do your portrait'. And I got into the habit of doing this as well."

He has always described himself as an outsider in the past. The word he uses today is loner. "I didn't make friends very easily at all." Did he have any brothers or sisters? "I had one sister. She was injured at birth. That was very distressing to me. That was a terrible experience. She took epileptic fits. Awful. And she was infantile. She died at the age of 20."

Is it too pat to ask if that had something to do with his loneliness, his sense of distance from those around him? "It must have had an effect," he says. And then he immediately connects this loss with another. "Then my mother committed suicide. She was living here with us when father died. One day she was sleeping in the bedroom upstairs and one day I went up and she wasn't there and a neighbour knocked at the door and said it looks like a child is floating in your pond'. She had actually drowned herself. She had gone down to the pond and drowned herself, terrible experience."

For a moment neither of us speak, in the still, now silent, afternoon.

There are of course years between those two deaths, and in the interim Davie made a name for himself. He may have been a loner but he was certainly a self-confident one. When he went to Edinburgh College of Art in 1937 he was happy to pick arguments with his tutors who were exasperated at his unwillingness to draw what was in front of him.

In conversation he veers between the unworldly - perhaps only Davie could tell you he loved battle drill in the army because it reminded him of the choreography of Balanchine - and a steely self-confidence. As well as painting, he reminds me he was a gifted silversmith and could have played golf professionally, and music too. But painting was the thing. He shows me an early self-portrait. He looks a handsome young man, dandyesque.

In 1941 he won a travelling scholarship, but the war intervened. He spent it manning an anti-aircraft battery during the Coventry blitz and wooing the women who also were part of the battery on the south coast. "It was a very romantic situation. And, oh, the love affairs I had. All the love poetry I wrote. It was a very strange wartime experience. Nothing to do with war. Although we did a lot of firing, in a way it was exciting, all this tremendous tension, the searchlights, the explosions, the noise, the turbine smoke, the rattle of projectiles and the shouts of the command, almost a theatrical atmosphere."

After the war he finally took up his scholarship. He was married by now, to Billi. In Venice, at the first Biennale, the pair of them discovered Picasso, Chagall, Paul Klee. And in turn Davie was discovered by Guggenheim. "I had a show and Peggy Guggenheim happened to be passing the gallery one day and looked in and saw my works and said this must be an American. How come I don't know him?' She was very good to me."

At the opening of an exhibition of his work in New York, he met the stars of the post-war art world. "They were all there. Pollock, De Kooning, Kline, Motherwell, and they were all very excited about what I was doing. We actually spent a weekend with Jackson Pollock out on Long Island. He was a terribly nice, sensitive guy. But we went to the Cedar bar where all the artists used to meet in New York and a lot of these artists were really jealous of Jackson for his success and they knew when he got drunk he'd do crazy things. So they used to purposely make him drunk to see what he could do. And he'd do mad things, like tipping up the table and send glasses flying. It was awful to see this sensitive guy change like that."

For Pollock, life subsumed art. That never happened to Davie. Even now, as he approaches his 10th decade, a widower now unfortunately, you can't look at his latest work and see the shadow of mortality in it. This afternoon he tells me regretfully that he's had to stop gliding "after a couple of near misses coming into land", about his love of speed, about the joy of cooking. After the piano playing he sees us off. I get a handshake. Kirsty the photographer gets a huge smack on the lips. Davie is arguably Scotland's greatest living painter. With the emphasis on living.

The Creative World of Alan Davie is on show at Dovecot, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh from August 5 until September 26, as part of the 2009 Edinburgh Art Festival. Admission £3 (£2 concessions).