At the tail-end of last year, I was transfixed in front of a larger-than-life Louise Bourgeois work at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery.

Displayed as part of an exhibition called I Give Everything Away, on the right-hand side of this hybrid of drawing, poetry and printmaking, a giant womb-like shape oozed blood-red from the paper. On the left-hand side, the words "I leave my home" filled a void of creamy white space.

It felt like I was inside Bourgeois's head and inside her world. It also reminded me of intense times of uncertainty and sadness in my own life. And reminded me that everything passes.

I thought of this incredible exhibition of Bourgeois's late work (it ended in February this year) when I watched flames lick through Glasgow School of Art's (GSA) world-famous Mackintosh Building. The outpouring of shock and disbelief which followed the fire at The Mac on May 23 crystalised a century-worth of artists' lives. This building was not just a collection of bricks and mortar; it had served as a nurturing home to hundreds of people - artists, designers, architects, curators, teachers and staff - for more than a century. It wasn't just a building for art and artists, although relationships began there which formed the backbone of Scotland's artistic community.

Like most homes, it hadn't had its troubles to seek, but it was always there; a place to which people returned to inhale the fairy dust which lurked in and around the whitewashed walls of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's cavernous studios, in his labyrinth-like stairwells and the weirdly wonderful 'hen run' (a glazed corridor which linked east and west wings). The jewel in its crown was its beautiful library, today a charred cinder of a space. The restoration work continues.

With prescient timing, just before the fire broke out, a nationwide survey of the last 25 years of Scotland's contemporary art scene, called GENERATION, kicked off. A partnership between the National Galleries of Scotland, Glasgow Life and Creative Scotland, GENERATION featured over 100 artists in over 60 galleries, exhibition spaces and venues the length and breadth of Scotland. The majority of exhibitions took place over the summer months as part of the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme. Many artists represented were linked to GSA, but not all.

This ambitious programme sought to tell the 'story' of Scotland's contemporary art success; to reach out beyond the Turner Prize mythology and the small cool private galleries which represent our homegrown contemporary 'art stars'.

On the whole, GENERATION was a generous and inclusive attempt to bring people into the fold of contemporary art without patronising or bamboozling them. Although the older GENERATION artists are still in their early fifties, we were treated to surveys of a lifetime's work by artists such as Douglas Gordon in Thurso and Alison Watt's in Perth. Dundee duo Dalziel + Scullion staged a two-part beautiful and poetic installation between An Lanntair in Stornoway and Dovecot in Edinburgh. Meanwhile, Jim Lambie knocked many socks off with his perky poppy colour and soaraway approach to everyday materials at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket.

Gordon's film work was also at GoMA in Glasgow under the snappily titled Pretty Much Every Film And Video Work From About 1992 Until Now. This epic and immersive installation, made up of countless old-school TV sets boxed together, was something to behold. I didn't see Gordon's Thurso show, but it did lead to the best headline I saw all year in the letters page of the John O'Groat Journal: "I love art" it read, "but this offering from Caithness Horizons is a pile of guff." I think Gordon would have been pleased.

My personal favourite from GENERATION was the re-staging of the late Steven Campbell's On Form & Fiction exhibition, first seen at the Third Eye Centre (now the CCA) in Glasgow in 1990 as part of its City of Culture programme. This show, in which all available wall space was covered by Campbell's swaggeringly intellectual flight of painterly fancy, was distilled in one room of Edinburgh's RSA building. Another GSA graduate who arrived there as a mature student via an early stint as a maintenance engineer in a steelworks, the man was a genius who left us too soon.

Although Campbell, had he lived, would have been 61 today, GENERATION by its very nature bypassed a hugely influential layer of older Scottish artists, including Lys Hansen. Her exhibition Love + War + Paint at the Lillie Gallery in Milngavie this summer was a tour de force of work spanning four decades.

Elsewhere, in Scotland, throughout the year, there were visual art highlights aplenty. A pair of giant mythical horse-like Kelpies, made of steel by GSA-trained sculptor Andy Scott, were unveiled at the Helix Park, outside Falkirk, in April. The Kelpies, which can be seen from the M9 as you drive past, have quickly been taken to the nation's collective bosom, with 730,000 visitors in the first six months.

The year was bookended by The Two Roberts; Colquhoun And MacBryde. The first exhibition, at the Dick Institute, celebrated Robert Colquhoun in his home town of Kilmarnock. It also featured work by Colquhoun's life partner, fellow Ayrshire-man Robert MacBryde, whom he met on his first day at GSA in 1933. Last month, a long-overdue retrospective devoted to both men, once dubbed the Golden Boys of Bond Street, opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. It is on until May and it is a beautiful exhibition on so many levels.

Appropriately enough, in a year which saw Scotland take stock of its cultural identity in the build-up to the referendum on independence, 2014 witnessed major exhibitions devoted to two men known in their native land as much for prose as they are for pictures.

John Byrne's Sitting Ducks at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery offered a tantalisingly small helping of his familiar wit and razor-sharp line, with beautiful portraits of Tilda Swinton, Billy Connolly and Steven Campbell, to name a few.

The still ongoing Alasdair Gray Season is a major five-venue celebration of the work of our nations's favourite irascible polymath, all curated by Sorcha Dallas. Two of the shows, at Glasgow Print Studio and Taigh Chearsabbagh, North Uist, have now ended, but Spheres Of Influence I and II, at GoMA and GSA, are still running, as is the knockout Alasdair Gray: From The Personal To The Universal, at Kelvingrove. Gray celebrates his 80th birthday tomorrow. We wish him many more years of creative fire behind his unique take on the world.