I can see him now, painting in the open air in Ardnamurchan or on Colonsay, canvas, easel and pigments on the palette, all in correspondence, in his movements of arm, hand, body, eyes keen to the whole vision before him, the brush-strokes bold and confident, but subtle and attentive to the intricate patterns of water and mountain and sky.

I remember when I was a wee boy, Uncle John took me out into the fields of his native Lanarkshire with two easels, canvases, paints and brushes, set me up beside him and told me to look closely at the clouds in the sky above, their form and movement, colours and tones, shifting shapes I was never quick enough to catch, but watched him do it so deft, so accurate. 'Paint what you see!' he commanded, like the army man he had been, but it was his generosity and friendliness that really made things possible.

It was my first lesson in close observation and I took it as far as I could in writing, in my own books of poems, First and Last Songs and Clearances, whose covers are graced
by paintings he gave me his happy permission to place there. When I edited Hugh MacDiarmid's Selected Poems for a Penguin Modern Classics edition, John supplied the
cover picture, Raised Beaches, to match the greatest of all modern Scottish poems, 'On a Raised Beach' and something of the spirit of Scotland breathes in John Cunningham's work as deeply and surely as it does in MacDiarmid, something unimaginable in any other country.

This is Scottish art at its quintessential best. In the arrangements of fruit in bowls and wine in decanters, sheet music on a music stand, crockery on a linen-covered table, pheasants or fish on their plates, or flowers in a vase or a Glasgow jug, there are moments in John's paintings that command you just as surely, to pause and gratefully enjoy that moment of decorum, before the eating and drinking commences.

Patience is part of his art. I recollect long hours of work with him in the studio at Charing Cross, stretching and nailing the canvases to frames, preparations for his painting trips to the north-west. Once, he showed me an old photograph of his father's father, a cobbler, sitting with his helper, shoes turned on a lathe as they worked, in perhaps the 1890s. He said this part of his work was as essential as making certain that the shoes were firmly soled and watertight.

This is not simply the mechanics of construction but essential to his vision. It gives what you see in the paintings lasting value, beyond fashion. They give pleasure to the eye and thinking mind. They are works that remind you why life is worth living, why it's good to be companionable, and share things, views of Scotland and other places, of tables and spaces to be occupied by sensitized people who care about such things.

All his paintings show the determined self-discipline of the artist whose commitment is total but, and in equal measure, the exuberance of pleasure in life's abundance, in the landscapes and seascapes of the west of Scotland, in the grace and precision, the measurements of sensual apprehension, in the still lifes. The intellectual explorations of the great philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, the architects and social thinkers, like Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Patrick Geddes, the famous engineers, all give Scottish achievement a reputation for practicality and straight dealing with fundamental issues, but these always require the complementarity of sensual thinking. The apprehension of reality through paintings is one of Scotland's greatest achievements, from William McTaggart through to the Scottish Colourists in whose tradition Cunningham's work securely resides, and in the largest human sense of comprehending what life might be if we have the courage to see it in all its richness and variety, here in Scotland.

Georges Braque once wrote: 'Objects do not exist for me except in so far as a harmonious relationship exists between them and between them and myself. When one attains this harmony one reaches a sort of intellectual nonexistence which makes everything possible and right.' John Cunningham's work can be looked at and studied in the intellectual history of modern Scottish painting, but again and again, in painting after painting, it delivers this sense that the world is still capable of being so full of possibility and rightness.

Professor Alan Riach
Scottish Literature
University of Glasgow