Planet Paul

I first met Al Bell when he co-ran a graphics company from the top floor of the old Red Hackle building on Otago Street, Glasgow in the 1990s. The office was an open-plan attic space which from the outside looked like an upturned boat atop the building. The windows gave a vista onto Kelvinbridge and the glittering waters of the River Kelvin below. This grand old building had once been the warehouse for the famous Red Hackle whisky – once known as Scotland’s best whisky – but back then in the 1990s, it was home to a graphics company, Anita Manning‘s Great Western Auctions, and a carpet business along the ground floor. Next door was the Guru Nanak Sikh Temple.

This graphics company had built up a highly successful portfolio with a large number of A-list clients. Then one day, Bell quit and moved onto running a variety of personal projects and businesses which unlocked different parts of his many talents. This led Bell, by one way and another, back to his love of painting.

Al Bell is a landscape artist. He paints the Scottish countryside in all its beauty, strangeness, and glory. His work fulfils the idea of the landscape artist reflecting not just the beauty of nature but presenting the countryside as a reflection of the human experience. 

Or as Caspar David Friedrich put it:

“The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within himself.”

This month, Bell has major solo exhibition Places at the Torrance Gallery in Edinburgh from 4th-25th July:

“Places is a solo exhibition presenting semi-abstract landscapes inspired by the Scottish countryside. Moving along a fluid line between realism and abstraction, the works explore memory, atmosphere and the emotional resonance of familiar places.“

Tell me about yourself and how you started painting?

Al Bell: I trained in graphic design in Glasgow and spent most of my career in the creative sector working mainly with art clients – theatre, music, dance and events. That was a joy and I loved getting involved with these energetic organisations, from small theatre groups to larger clients like the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and Scottish Ballet. I designed all the first Celtic Connections materials, worked with Glasgow Jazz Festival, The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Centre For Contemporary Arts to name a few. This was a great cultural time for Glasgow with the city playing the roles of City of Culture and City of Architecture and Design and I was lucky enough to be right in the middle of it! After 2010 I evolved into game design and created landscape environments for computer games, designing digital assets inspired by nature. And now I paint landscape! In a way it all feels like a natural progression with common threads like composition, texture, shape and colour running through all these career phases. In graphic design it was my job to interpret my clients’ brief visually. I’m now in a position where the natural world around us is writing the brief and all I have to do is capture even just a tiny part of that pass it on in paintings.

When did you start painting?

AB: My father was an architect and painter who always had a watercolour on the go and loved to experiment with acrylic and oil. His subject matter was varied but landscape was his passion. When I was around eight years old he painted a large scene of footballers high on my bedroom wall – he was an inspiration. I drew and painted a little here and there throughout my life but, being busy with my design career, I always thought it would be something I’d take up seriously later on!

That time finally came around early 2021 and I set about a process of learning and developing my art practice. I first showed work in a gallery late 2021 and have been contributing to group shows since then. In late ’25 I was selected to take part in the Visual Arts Scotland Biennial show at RSA in Edinburgh. That was a real honour and inspiration to be part of a national exhibition alongside such creative talent.

What attracts you to landscapes and how do you paint?

AB: I’m obsessed with the detail of landscape. I love quiet corners that, while not usually recognisable vistas, still resonate with viewers who have the sense that they have been to and enjoyed that exact spot. In a way, I’m trying to paint the idea of a place rather than replicating a particular scene. I find that is a powerful way to get closer to my goal of connecting to the viewer.

I tend to use quite abstract brushwork or loose palette knife shapes to quickly build up areas of dark and light, textural gestures that are not detailed on close inspection but when viewed as a whole, have an engaging sense of realism.  I simply love the marks a paint brush makes on canvas and always aim to leave as much raw brushwork as I can! I like to see the energy of the artists movements in a painting and I aim to do this in my own work.

I’m also very keen on dynamic composition, where the viewer is led into the painting through subtle vectors, directional marks and atmospheric perspective. I consider myself to be a fairly technical painter but my aim is always to convey emotion and atmosphere.

I’m constantly enthralled with the beauty of the natural world, the colour, textures, shapes and moods. I love observing and travelling through the landscape, being immersed in it all, so I’m naturally drawn to the idea of representing what I see on canvas. I particularly enjoy taking a scene that may not at first seem to be the “headline act” but rather something less obvious and find a way to express the beauty of it in paint. Very often this might be an old forest path inviting the viewer to turn a corner out of site, to discover a way beyond. Or it might be the still surface of a river, capturing the reflection of the trees above with the tiniest hint of light reflecting on ripples. Sometimes it’s simply the edge of woodland. And clouds, well they write their own rules I just try to follow! This may make me sound like I’m a bit of an old romantic but to me this beauty is essential to help us navigate our way through life and I simply try to interpret these notions as understated but engaging paintings.

Which artists influence you? Who do you like and why?

AB: I’m drawn to landscape artists who totally understand realism but express their work in a fluid, abstract or graphic way. It’s their technical skill and seemingly effortless freedom of process that I enjoy as well as their ability to create the sublime from every day scenes.

20th Century figures like Andrew Wyeth and Richard Schmid are high on my list of inspirations as well as painters like Tom Thomson. I’m also a huge fan of Scottish artist, James Morrison. His use of transparent colour, his immaculate draftsmanship and his depiction of incidental detail and sweeping skies – all contributed to my desire to paint landscape.

Also, there is a wealth of highly talented painters currently working that are a huge source of inspiration. Painters like Tibor Nagy, David Lidbetter or Vladimir Kirillov are all good examples. But just seeing any amazing art on Instagram is enough to set me off!

Tell me about your forthcoming exhibition?

AB: Places will be my first solo show and reflects a range of subjects and locations I love to visit and to paint – from deep moody forest to wild coastal cloudscapes. I often explore forgotten forest paths or overgrown riverside, usually while dog walking or cycling, and  such places are my starting point. Although these scenes can be quite diverse, I’m aiming to bring them together as a story of my deep appreciation of landscape and my joy of painting.

There is a flow of technique that responds and adapts to the various subjects, forms and shapes I see.
I hope the uniting factor in the collection is in the way I perceive and interpret the beauty that surrounds us in nature.

I’m particularly interested in play of light, where dark corners meet incoming rays, sunlight through trees, sky reflected in water or the contrast of deep soft shadow against bright skies. There is drama in this.

I like to explore my subjects using techniques somewhere between realism and abstraction – playing on a sliding scale between those ideals but always with as minimal a suggestion of detail as I can manage. I’m not really interested in literal representation but aiming to leave something to the viewer’s imagination, to capture the mood and atmosphere of a place that connects people to their own memories. My hope is that they are drawn into my representation of the landscape and get lost in that place. I find that when that moment of recognition happens people really relate strongly to the works. It’s incredibly rewarding to be able to represent memory of place in that way.

So all these thoughts have gone into the show. I hope the collection brings a little joy and excitement to people with a love of landscape and an appreciation of paint on canvas.

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With thanks to Al Bell.

All images copyright Al Bell – used by kind permission.

Al Bell’s exhibition Places, Torrance Gallery, Edinburgh, details here.