Glasgow's rain doesn't just water the plants; it transforms the city into a mirror, and that's exactly why three painters with radically different philosophies have converged on the city for a show at The Lemond Gallery. Personally, I think there's something deeply poetic about artists chasing reflections in puddles while the rest of us rush for cover. What makes this particularly fascinating is how the exhibition exposes the fault lines in contemporary British painting—between the spontaneous and the calculated, the famous and the self-made, the real and the surreal.
Plastic Saints
Brian Henderson's still lifes are where the exhibition gets genuinely uncomfortable, and I mean that as a compliment. He paints plastic Mickey Mouse figures alongside Tintin and Snowy with the same meticulous light study he would give a Hockney-esque vase of fruit. From my perspective, this is a brilliant subversion of art hierarchies—why should a Disney toy be less worthy of serious attention than a bowl of peaches? What makes this particularly fascinating is his admission of an "unsuccessful flirtation" with New York School abstraction before settling into this pop-infused realism. It's as if he tried the tortured genius route, found it exhausting, and opted for joy instead. The late Wayne Thiebaud, who actually worked for Disney as an animator, would probably approve of this lineage. If you take a step back and think about it, Henderson's work asks us why we feel embarrassed about loving pop culture, as if enjoying Mickey Mouse requires an intellectual apology that enjoying, say, a Chard still life does not. His Edinburgh College of Art training seems to have given him the technical chops to make plastic objects look monumental, which is exactly the tension that makes the paintings work.
Architecture Without People
Euan McGregor's work operates on a completely different frequency, and that's what saves this exhibition from becoming a nostalgia trip. His distilleries aren't just buildings; they're "cultural cathedrals," a phrase that reveals how we project spiritual meaning onto industrial spaces when we're desperate for meaning in a secular age. In my opinion, his use of drone photography to create aerial views of Padstow harbour represents a fundamental shift in how we document place—now we see from above before we ever walk the streets. What this really suggests is that contemporary landscape painting has become a form of archaeology, documenting spaces that might soon be gentrified out of existence. The fact that his works feature no humans is, to me, the most radical choice in the show. By eliminating people, McGregor forces us to confront the architecture itself, the relief printmaking technique that creates those haphazard marks, and the strange silence of empty public spaces. Personally, I think there's a loneliness to these paintings that mirrors our post-pandemic relationship with public life—we want the beauty without the crowd. His background in printmaking at Glasgow School of Art in the 1990s clearly informs this graphic precision, yet the haphazard mark-making suggests he's fighting against too much control.
The Validation Game
One thing that immediately stands out is how the art world's power dynamics haven't really changed—we still wait for permission from shadowy figures to matter. Peter Brown, or Pete The Street as his 200,000 followers know him, represents a generation of painters who built audiences through Instagram before galleries caught up. From my perspective, his acceptance into Banksy's Cut & Run exhibition at GoMA isn't just a credential; it's a statement about what street credibility actually means in 2026. What many people don't realize is that Brown has painted close to 100 Glasgow scenes across two visits, roaming from Merchant City to the Gorbals like a modern-day flâneur with an easel. If you take a step back and think about it, his refusal to meet Banksy actually says more about artistic integrity than any interview could. He paints in oils on board, admits he hasn't got a clue what makes good art, and dismisses the "hot air" surrounding the industry—yet here he is, showing 25 studies of the West End. This raises a deeper question: Are we romanticizing authenticity, or has the market finally caught up with the people who actually make things outside? A detail that I find especially interesting is that Brown identifies as a British Impressionist but rejects photo-realism, suggesting that the "rough and ready" quality is the whole point—it's about the experience of painting out in the open, not the product.
Final Thoughts
Personally, I think we need more shows like this—ones that refuse to choose between the street and the studio, between the plastic toy and the cathedral, between the famous validator and the unknown painter. What this really suggests is that the future of British art isn't in any single movement, but in the messy, contradictory space where they all overlap. If you've ever stood in the rain watching Glasgow's architecture reflect in a puddle, you already understand what these artists are trying to capture.
