Duncan Shanks was born in Airdrie in 1937 and studied at Glasgow School of Art where he later lectured. He takes his subjects and inspiration from the countryside around his home in the Clyde Valley and uses strong colour and richly applied paint to chart the changing seasons and the forces imminent in nature. His works also examine the perennial tasks and practices of traditional rural life.

'Duncan Shanks is a committed and self-aware modernist. Nevertheless he chose from the beginning of his career the apparently old-fashioned idiom of landscape... his pictures reach beyond abstraction to achieve, in his own words, "a fusion of the actual and the abstract.’"'
- Duncan MacMillan, Author and art critic

In the last five decades, he has filled more than 100 sketchbooks with a wide variety of drawings, from simple recordings of his surroundings to exploratory studies investigating complex subjects and more finished drawings. 

The long standing relationship between Shanks and The Hunterian, which dates back to the early 1990s, led the artist to gift his entire collection of 106 sketchbooks to the University in 2013. The Hunterian’s collection of sketchbooks by Duncan Shanks provides a unique insight into one artist’s remarkable journey through the creative process.

The image shown here is from one of those sketchbooks, now at the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, and depicts the distinctive outline of Cir Mhor summit, in the northern hills of Arran.

References:

The Duncan Shanks sketchbook collection:

https://www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/collections/collectionsummaries/art/duncanshanks/

The Scottish Gallery biography of Duncan Shanks

https://scottish-gallery.co.uk/artist/duncan-shanks