Artist Carol Rhodes possesses a very curious collection of reading matter. Text books, tourist brochures, and threadbare books are neatly stacked against her Tramway studio. Faded colour titles from the 1960s like Welcome To John O'Groats and Golf Courses of Scotland have lain here during her three-month residency. However, it is the large colour book opened on her desk that gives the greatest insight into this Glasgow-based artist's work - The Earth From Above.

Common to all of Rhodes' perfectly concentrated paintings featured in her solo Tramway exhibition, is the aerial view. An angle that accentuates the unease that leaks outs from her already dislocated subject matter of the invented landscape. Views of Nowheresville. A David Lynch still-life. Should you recognise them? Could that be a scene from the M8? All the paintings are rooted in the contemporary. Industrial or man-made components like grain silos, water tanks, car parks, roads, reservoirs, and unpopulated buildings. They possess a stillness, almost

a melancholy.

Look again at these beautifully executed paintings grouped together and another world emerges. One of sensuous beauty. The curves of the roads sweeping round a hill; the textured rocky outcrop; the regimented caravans lined up on smooth green bay.

This impression is underlined by the subtle variations of greys, greens, purples, and yellows, that

some critics have favourably compared to Whistler

and Corot.

There's also the wonderful mellow pinks in some of her buildings that owes much to her Indian childhood.

As she explains, though Edinburgh-born, the 41-year-old was raised in Calcutta by her parents, who worked as theologians there. And it was to India that she looked subconsciously when choosing the colours of her palate. ''Though you might think of bright colours in connection to India, where we were in Bengal the heat haze made

the colours of buildings

quite muted.''

Tropical heat hazes were far from her mind during the recent Tramway project, she grins. She may have looked on to the transformed tram depot's zen garden, but a very non-zen mound of rubble and rubbish lies just above it. However, for someone who confesses a frisson of excitement at the sight of a slag-heap, this was all grist to the artistic mill.

For the Tramway show is a landmark for Rhodes. ''It's exactly a decade since I worked in the exact same Tramway studio,'' she recalls. In the same vein, she now teaches part-time at Glasgow School of Art where she graduated with a Fine

Art degree.

Since then, she has featured in many international and national group shows and was recently nominated for the prestigious 1999 Jerwood Prize for Painting as well as appearing in this year's British Art Show. There are also solo shows planned for Santa Monica in November and another for New York in 2001.

Despite this apparent flurry of activity, Rhodes insists that her work-rate is far from hasty. ''I work very, very, slowly in a very, very concentrated way so I only produce a few paintings each year. With Tramway I did one a month which is an awful lot for me.''

The creative distilling process is lengthy. With the kernel of an idea in her head she consults a slew of amassed source material - geology and town planning books, her personal library of aerial photographs taken from a helicopter trip, and school geography text books. Especially the latter. Why? ''Because they are neutral. They are factual. They show the aluminium smelters, the reservoirs, and roads as they are, not filtered through someone else's lens. That's why someone like Colin Baxter's books are useless to me. He amplifies what is there. I like it bland.''

Filtering through this material a composite finally emerges. Though only after ''hundreds of drawings''.

What attracts her to superficially cold and rather odd scenes of our cities and greenbelts? ''I'm just drawn to those in-between places. They are like non-places, backs of buildings, ground that's been grown over, often formed by accident. They have no history. It's as if all the movement and action has taken place within the last few hours. So much of our landscape is invisible. When we do look at it we think it's ugly, if we consider it at all!''

As a keen cyclist, Rhodes says she comes across these non-places all the time. Cycling to the Tramway from her West End home over the past three months, she grew accustomed to such a place. ''It's just over the Bell's Bridge near the SECC,'' she explains excitedly. ''It's a very odd area because amidst this odd area is a tiny meadow with trees and tall grass and wildlife and underneath it are bits of cobbled path. I get a great thrill from these hidden places!'' It is to her credit that Rhodes' paintings can make the viewer look for these hitherto hidden places within all our cities.

n Carol Rhodes's solo show is at The Tramway, in Glasgow until August 27