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John Boyd

Perhaps the leading figurative in postwar Scotland, John Boyd worked principally in oils, painting figures, portraits, and still lifes.

As his friend and colleague the painter Archie Forrest has written: "In John's late work, he celebrates the common man - the fisher and the plougher - recognizing and paying tribute to their quiet strength. John was, in my opinion, unwittingly made of the same stuff. It takes courage to look back it the history of art in search of knowledge. The more we understand the past, the more we can see the future. John Boyd understood this. He was deeply interested in the vocabulary of painting through tradition, realizing that once gleaned, dismantled, reconstructed and filtered through the personality of the artist, it becomes something else -- the new brick laid on a solid foundation."