John Lowrie Morrison interview: Love, faith and clarity

IT bursts through a break in the brooding sky above Argyll, floods through his Knapdale studio and refreshes what has been the view from his easel these last ten years. "Light," says John Lowrie Morrison when asked what it is about the west coast of Scotland that makes it unique. "I love the way the light affects the landscape. You don't get the same bright colours, the same intensity anywhere else in the world."

He should know. Scotland's leading contemporary expressionist has fairly trotted about the globe, taking to its every corner the landscape from which he has made a living.

His rural motifs are common enough – lopsided crofts, peat stacks, empty boats by the beach – but what sets him apart, what has made him into a commercial phenomenon, is his ability to see colour where others don't. Zoom in with a camera, as he always does in the course of his preparatory work, and even the most neutral of shades is revealed to be something more intense, a vivid hue to which he is faithful on canvas. "That's where I see the bright colours. Most people see them only peripherally. I make them a big part of my picture. Having said that, if you go to Iona, or any of the white sandy beaches up the west coast, the water is green. People say to me, 'Where did you get the green water, son?' I tell them to get out more. Go and have a look."

Morrison divides opinion. While he has yet to convince the critics – many of whom think he is too prolific, too formulaic, and his style too damn nice, to be taken seriously – he seems to go down rather well with everyone else. "Where is the recession?" asks the man who earns 2 million a year from the sale of his paintings, some of which have gone to the unlikeliest of homes, from the Queen and Chris Patten to Sting, Sir David Murray and Madonna.

A range of cards, calendars, prints, mugs and table mats, the profits from which go to charity, are an indication of his grassroots popularity, and his impact on the tourist trade ought not to be lost on VisitScotland. "CalMac have made a lot of money out of me," he says with a smile, "as have a few hotels on Mull and Iona. Most people who buy my work like to go to the place I've painted."

And, when it comes to making a name for yourself, a catchy abbreviation doesn't do any harm. 'Jolomo' might not be up there with Banksy, or the squiggle that was supposed to represent Prince but, in Scotland at least, he is building what can only be described as a brand. Stumbled upon while doodling in his Latin class 47 years ago, it has been scribbled at the foot of his paintings since 1985, and is now the envy of many a marketing consultant. The artist formerly known as John – now 60, with a goatee and long, thinning hair – says his trips to the central belt are often interrupted by middle-aged women seeking his autograph. They think his real name is Joseph Lomo.

They are also apt to confuse his paintings with his personality. His mother had severe dementia, his brother and son have learning difficulties, and if there isn't quite a sadness in the smile, he admits that life has sometimes caught up with him. He isn't necessarily the splash of colour projected by his work. "Sometimes I get fed up of people coming up to me in the street, thinking I'm this Jolly Jolomo figure, with no heartaches, no problems," he says. "Money doesn't buy everything."

Which is a pity, for he has plenty of it. Sitting down by the window of his workplace, an airy extension to his home just outside Tayvallich, he is willing to talk about anything from the establishment's failure to recognise his work to the religious faith that informs it and his fear of an independent Scotland, but there is one avenue he will not go down. "Some things I don't like to analyse, and success is one of them. I don't know why people like things, and I don't want to know. Over the years, I have learned not to go there. If I start trying to analyse, I might lose the spontaneity. I might lose the spark."

MORRISON ALWAYS wanted to paint. Although his roots are in the Outer Hebrides, where his cousins still work in the family croft, he was born and brought up as part of a working-class family in Glasgow's West End. His first drawing was in the steam of their kitchen window, done while he bathed in the sink. "I had a date with destiny," he says.

He studied at Glasgow School of Art in the late 1960s, before heading for Argyll in 1973 to become a teacher. There, he spent his free time gathering thoughts and information, which he didn't utilise until giving up the day job in 1997. It is how he works even now, sketching and snapping ideas on his travels, and later applying them to the history, geography and geology he has learned about an area. One wall of his studio is lined with the relevant books, the other with a library of around 20,000 photos, all of which are to be recorded on a database. After what he calls a gestation period, he feels able to paint. "I just think that when all that comes together in your psyche, it feeds the painting. Your feel for a person or a place will come through naturally."

Painting quickly, instinctively, with a bold technique, is Jolomo's style. Working between 60 and 80 hours every week, he completes around four canvases a day, more than 1,000 a year. Restless without a brush in his hand, he thrives on what he calls his "cottage industry". "I'm an expressive painter and that lends itself to working fast. Constable, Turner and Picasso were all like that. Sometimes their work was done in seconds or minutes. A lot of people are a bit perturbed that you haven't spent months on something they've paid a lot of money for. When they ask how long it took, I say 40 years. That's how long I've been working to get this far."

If art has a purpose, it is to describe that which transcends words, an emotion perhaps, or a trick of the mind. The west coast, with all its atmosphere, is fertile ground for artists, even if Morrison cannot explain it. "I don't know what it is. It's not history because the east coast has history. There's just something about it, especially the islands. If you go down to Eilean Morg, and sit there on a summer's day, you feel as if there is no-one else in the world."

People rarely feature in Morrison's painting. He doesn't want them to detract from the landscape. Only the mark of man is included, an open gate or a ladder against a wall. He is often told by admirers that his work reminds them of their childhood. "There is a spiritual quality to the west coast, and not just because of the Christian influence on Iona and the islands. It has a connection with nature. A lot of people tell me they are not religious, but that my paintings give them a spiritual feeling. That's because they are expressing God's creation."

He attended Sunday school from the age of four, but it wasn't until he was 21 that religion changed his life. The catalyst was a visit to the Tron Church in Glasgow, where Cliff Richard appeared in a dramatisation of the crucifixion. "Suddenly, your eyes are opened and you realise, gosh, this is the way I should live for the rest of my life," says Morrison, who has also painted religious figurative scenes based on biblical text. In Mull this summer, where he has another studio, he plans to do more.

His decision to leave Glasgow 36 years ago was the making of him, personally and professionally. "The city is man-made and can be quite aggressive, too edgy for me. The country can be edgy as well, but it's a different edginess. I like the weather, the transience of the whole thing, the way nature changes all the time. You don't really feel much of that in the city. I feel closer to God here, closer to creation. I love the way you can see the mark of God on the landscape, and also the mark of man. I play with that."

He also communicates the word of God. In the early 1980s, when his local minister was taken unwell, Morrison was asked to deputise. Later, when he was preparing to take a service at Bellanoch, a "lovely wee Highland church" down by Crinan Canal, he says he felt a call to the ministry. He registered for part-time leadership in the Church of Scotland, training for five years. He now provides pulpit supply around Argyll, taking services about twice a month.

He says there is more enthusiasm for religion on the west coast, especially in the remote areas, where churches have healthier congregations and a lick of fresh paint, but he still worries about its future. Morrison is one of the youngest members in his parish. "We don't have the young people coming any more, and that's our future. I love organ music, singing hymns, but a lot of young folk can't take to it. People move away and, although they still have beliefs and feelings, they are not drawn back. My son, Pete, goes to Destiny Church in Glasgow, which has thousands of young people in it. It's a huge church, quite evangelical and charismatic. More young people are going to these kind of churches than mainstream. They are springing up all over, and that's where they will go unless the Church of Scotland changes.

"The whole way of doing it, what is preached, the way it is preached, needs to change. You have to draw people in, which a lot of ministers are not doing. The training of ministers needs to change so that they have a 21st-century view of the world and spirituality. The older people don't want change, and you can understand that, but it needs to happen. Unless there is a spiritual revival as they had in Lewis many years ago, unless young people are brought back in, I don't know where the Church of Scotland is going to be 50 years, even 25 years, from now."

Morrison talks of a parallel between his preaching and his painting. Both are forms of communication, aimed at drawing people in. At 1,000 for the smallest and 12,000 for the biggest, his work is relatively affordable. While it makes commercial sense for such a prolific artist to encourage demand, he insists that the objective is to be a people's painter, if not a painter of people. "Even the 12 grand one is within reach of somebody who maybe doesn't want to buy a car. One couple told me they had sold their grand piano to buy one of my paintings. Nurses, teachers, lorry drivers, all sorts buy my work, people who have never bought paintings before. That means far more to me than Madonna buying them. If you start putting prices at 50,000, it takes it into a different bracket. I want to paint pictures that anyone can afford, and if that means earning less money, I don't really care. That's not what it's about."

That, says Morrison, is why the curators of the national galleries have repeatedly shunned his work. While he is no fan of Jack Vettriano – "I'm not into all that sexuality" – he thinks they are both victims of intellectual snobbery. "There seems to be this idea that, if you're not starving like Van Gogh, struggling to sell anything, then you're not a real artist," he says. "I don't understand that. I sell more paintings than any other artist in the country, and I have produced some high-quality work over the years, yet not one gallery has bought anything. If someone is very popular, they should reflect that. It's public money after all. It's their duty. If they don't buy anything by me or Vettriano, they are leaving a gap in Scottish art history."

Morrison suspects he is not dark or depressing enough for the critics. He has been through his angst-ridden period, and has the paintings to show for it, but his passion now is for beauty, and the healing quality attributed to it by Monet. He worries about the declining credibility of landscape painting, and the rise of conceptual art. "A lot of it is quite shallow and trite. People are just trying to be clever. Art, to me, is communication. Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and a lot of others producing this stuff are not communicating with people. It is all to do with celebrity. Tracey Emin has become a celebrity, swanning about all these wee private views as if she were some sort of queen. I mean, just get on with it."

In an effort to reverse the trend, he set up the Jolomo Awards for Scottish Landscape Painting. With a total of 30,000 in prize money, they are the biggest privately-funded awards in Scotland. With a 30ft yacht, a passion for Formula One and three vehicles of his own – a Land Rover, a Mercedes and a Morgan sports car – Morrison is not immune to the trappings of wealth, but it is more than offset by his philanthropic gestures. He says he raises 250,000 for charity every year.

Having been carers for three close family relatives, he and his wife Maureen are patrons of the Princess Royal Trust for Carers. For a variety of other causes, he donates about 30 paintings for auction each year. One of those, Winter Falls on Linlithgow Palace, was commissioned by First Minister Alex Salmond for his 2007 Christmas card. It was sold for 10,000 and raised around 30,000 in total. Morrison gets along well with the leader of the Scottish National Party, but their relationship is not born of political ambition. "I'm a supporter in many ways of the SNP, but I'm not a nationalist. I'm not sure a separate country would work. I've been very impressed with Alex Salmond – he's the best First Minister we have had – but I don't agree with this idea that, to be patriotic, you have to vote SNP. You can be passionately Scottish, and proud to be British as well. There is a lot to be said for our Britishness. We work well as a country. And I love the whole royalty thing."

You don't paint almost every conceivable corner of the west coast without loving Scotland. He says his work – not just the canvases, but the photographs and the exhaustive research – should be preserved as a historical record, of the time, the area and its people. Religion, rural life, landscape painting: they are, for Morrison, indistinguishable. Their light, he hopes, will never go out.