John Houston RSA’s interest in Japan grew over the 1970s and 80s. He was inspired to start collecting Japanese art and objects, as was his wife, the artist Elizabeth Blackadder RSA, and choice collected artefacts appear in both artists’ paintings from this period.
Houston and Blackadder worked as lecturers at Edinburgh College of Art, and the long university holidays enabled the couple to travel far afield. They made their first visit to Japan in 1985, and the country had an indelible impact on both artists’ work. Upon their return, Houston set about trying to capture what he had seen and experienced.
The defining quality of much of Houston’s artwork is its expressionistic quality. He was never seduced by abstraction, and even his most spare, fluid paintings of skies or seas have a representational basis. Yet Houston portrayed the world not as he saw it, but as he felt it. Despite making photographs and sketches documenting his travels, Houston’s Japanese paintings and prints are, above all, deeply personal visualisations of emotional response and memory.
Bamboo Grove, Kyoto depicts a forest of tall, swaying stalks. Houston constructs a rich visual plane, overlaying the rhythmical, vertical lines of the soaring bamboo in the foreground with the concentric arcs in the background, which create an impression of density and movement. The scene’s spatial depth is ambiguous; Houston has instead focussed on evoking the sensory experience of being immersed within the bamboo grove.
John Houston RSA, Temple Garden on a Rainy Day, Kyoto, 1989. Woodcut.
Houston was inspired by the clean lines of traditional Japanese architecture. Temple Garden on a Rainy Day, Kyoto depicts a view framed by paper screens, which are mounted on grid-like supports. The doorway’s stark vertical and horizontal lines are juxtaposed with the diagonal lines of the driving rain and the organic meanders of the temple’s raked sand, capturing the austere, spiritual atmosphere of the Zen garden.
John Houston RSA, Red Bridge, Nikko, 1987-88. Oil on canvas.
Red Bridge, Nikko is one of Houston’s most significant paintings inspired by Japan. It captures a view over the seventeenth-century Shinkyō Bridge, which affords access to Nikko’s temples and shrines. Houston renders this historic viewpoint with a highly stylised, almost Futurist sensibility, using bold black outlines to promote underlying geometric forms in the landscape. The work interweaves memory and emotional response to the as-yet unfamiliar terrain, resulting in an expressionist tour-de-force.
John Houston RSA, Temple Garden with Waterfall and Pagoda, 1991. Lithograph.
Houston collaborated with Glasgow Print Studio to create Temple Garden with Waterfall and Pagoda. It utilises the limited palette imposed by many printmaking techniques to conjure a vivid, graphic scene using only blacks, whites and yellows. The vista appears to be half-remembered and half-imagined, as if Houston were meditating on the awe-inspiring Japanese landscapes he had witnessed.
Several of the works illustrated in this article are included in our current Academicians’ Gallery exhibition, Far Afield, which brings together artworks by Royal Scottish Academicians created on location and through travel. The exhibition includes paintings, prints and studies developed in response to new landscapes and cultures, and celebrates the enduring relationship between travel and artistic practice.
Houston and Blackadder were firm believers in the importance of travel for artists. In 2021, the Royal Scottish Academy received the Blackadder Houston Bequest. Included in this legacy gift were several travelling awards for artists, including the RSA Blackadder Houston Student Travel Awards and the RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Travel Awards.
