Leadbetter

SKETCHBOOK in hand, Duncan Shanks has walked - and re-walked - every last inch of the Clyde Valley these last few decades. There is not an inch of it he is not intimately acquainted with. Its glens, burns and reservoirs are like old friends. Shanks is one of Scotland's finest landscape painters, held in high esteem by those who know about such things. By his own account he is shy of publicity, and wary of the kind of social demands that come from being involved in the art world and its trappings.

Next month, however, comes an exhibition that provides an arresting insight into how Shanks works, and which should also elevate him somewhat in the public gaze. His entire collection of 106 sketchbooks from the last 55 years, containing some 6,500 drawings and gifted to Glasgow University's Hunterian Art Gallery, will go on show there, from March 14. An accompanying book, The Poetry of Place, containing dozens of his sketches, their subjects ranging from Davingill Burn In Spate, to Carmichael Road, Tinto, Morning, is being published at the same time.

Looking at the book and at his sketchbooks in the gallery, you appreciate not only what a fine landscape painter Shanks is, but how striking the Clyde Valley is, too.

The exhibition and the book both involve Anne Dulau Beveridge, who has been curator of pre-1945 French and British Art at The Hunterian since 1997. She has come to know Shanks well since 2008, when contact was first made with him to discuss the possible gift of his sketchbooks.

"What Duncan has said to me, again and again," says Beveridge, "is the fact that he works for himself. He was determined to find a new way of looking at landscape. He did not want to do what had already been done by others.

"He has great facility as a draughtsman and a very good eye. He is very good at quickly capturing what catches his eye. But he isn't interested in the commercial aspect of the art world."

Shanks was born in Airdrie 78 years ago and was raised in Uddingston. He studied at Glasgow School of Art between 1955 and 1960. In his final year there he met Una Gordon, a fellow artist who would become his wife.

In 1961 Shanks began to work as GSA as a part-lecturer; he and Una married in 1966 and the following year they set up home in Davingill House, at Crossford. His sketchbooks teem with more than 500 drawings of their remarkable garden alone.

In the intervening decades he has come to detail every aspect of the Clyde Valley and its "beautiful diversity" and its "ancient and unpopulated" landscapes. In all weathers, too. The two freezing winters of 2010 and 2011 inspired many evocative drawings.

Shanks has risked life and limb to capture the Falls of Clyde - one of his favourite locations. He has sought shelter under a rocky outcrop on Tinto hill as the rain and the cold made their presence felt.

"I have never had to travel far for inspiration," the book quotes him as saying. "A need for solitude has attracted me to unpeopled places, where man's intervention is least apparent - the haunts of dippers and goosander by the river, fox in the glen, hare on the hilltop and buzzard and hawks in the clouds above the thorn edges of the valley."

He is particularly taken with the Falls of Clyde. In the book he describes his attempts to paint the middle fall, and recollects the "familiar damp smell of the river and the vegetation of fern and moss on the streaming cliff walls, the deafening roar of the torrent of water and a sense that the whole world was shaking and that the rocks above were about to collapse on me."

He is not, as it turns out, the first painter to be bewitched by the falls: JMW Turner depicted them in watercolours during a sketching tour in 1801, and Scots-born Jacob More (c1740-1793) and Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840) were, too.

"From the 18th century onwards," says Beveridge, "there's a fair amount of history and tradition of painters visiting the Clyde Valley.

"Here at the university the Foulis Academy of Art and Design was created in the 18th century, and its students would go along the Clyde river and the local castles.

"Duncan was very aware, I think, of the artists who had been to the Falls of Clyde before him. Turner was there, yes, and a lot of Scottish landscape artists in that century.

"He has, however, a unique way of depicting the falls. And Tinto hill is truly something that does not seem to have been tackled by artists before as a subject matter.

"It's the same with the distant reservoirs and burns that he discovered thanks to his wife's work with schools: she trained teachers in remote schools across the area.

"It has been a pleasure for me to follow in his footsteps," says Beveridge. "I've discovered parts of Scotland I might not otherwise have gone to. What they all have in common is their wilderness, their remoteness.

"Any evidence of man's existence is slight. What signs there are, are echoes of the past - of more ancient times. I think that this idea is something that really interests Duncan. So is the interweaving of his personal associations with a place into the patterns of its landscape. You and I will probably not see that, but it's an important part of the way that he triggers his imagination and that he gets inspiration."

It's strange to think that the Clyde Valley is not a remote and inaccessible part of Scotland but is only a short drive from Glasgow. Nevertheless, it is an area that Shanks has made its own. As you read this, he is probably out of doors once again, drawn by the ever-changing landscape.

As he himself puts it, in the new book: "Working in harmony with nature in my notebooks has been an act of faith and an adventure which has taken me to and beyond the poetry of place on a personal odyssey."

* Duncan Shanks Sketchbooks, Hunterian Art Museum, March 14-August 16. Admission free. The Poetry of Place: Duncan Shanks's Sketchbooks and the Upper Clyde, will be published by Freight Books in hardback at £15.99.

* www.visitscotland.com/destinations-maps/glasgow-clyde-valley/