"I wouldn't be the painter I am if I didn't live and work in Scotland."

Born in Dundee in 1945, Hugh Murdoch was educated and trained in Edinburgh. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Hugh did not head south to seek his artistic fortune. His work draws on his knowledge and love of Scottish landscape, history and religion, and covers a broad spectrum of subjects from figurative to landscape.

Increasingly Hugh has become a prominent and successful “Scottish Artist”. His most recent works owe much to his very earliest influences: McTaggart, Gillies and Wilson. Hugh says “As a young man I spent invaluable time with these painters”.

"Today Hugh Murdoch is a full-time painter with growing confidence in his own direction and renaissance. His paintings demonstrate an intensified and developed understanding of colour and mood. At the same time, the work possesses a more investigative intellectual rigour, which can only come with maturity." Graham Noble, Critic

Hugh’s paintings hang in private collections throughout the world and he regularly exhibits in The Strathearn Gallery, Crieff, The Iona House Gallery in Woodstock and Eduardo Alessandro Studios in Broughty Ferry. His work can also be seen periodically in various galleries throughout the country and abroad.

He lives and works in a farmhouse on Lethangie Estate near Kinross. His studio home has a water garden and woodland privacy to calm and inspire the soul.

"Colour, texture and light, these three factors are incredibly important to me,"

"That and the way paint works on different surfaces."

Although he trained in oils and painted extensively with water colours, for the past decade Hugh has worked almost exclusively with acrylics. "It's a diverse medium. It dries quickly and offers a more flexible range of techniques, allowing me to capture fully the personality of the subject, be it figure or landscape."

The Lethangie Studio and Gallery provides the ideal platform for Hugh to work and to show that work - but this is by no means an exclusive outlet for his paintings.

A burgeoning reputation and a dramatic rise in picture sales are the result of a highly successful series of exhibitions over recent years in galleries, private homes, offices and a variety of venues around Scotland. Hugh sees a continuation of all of these activities as an essential element of his outreach and exposure to a wide and varied viewing public.

This increasingly high profile has had an enormous effect on Hugh's workrate and he has met this challenge with vigour and honesty. "Painting is everything to me. Intense, challenging, inspiring, passionate, spiritually rewarding, emotional, sometimes painfully so. Above all, it is craft and skill and vision - and solid hard work!"

While his paintings will indeed be seen by visitors to Lethangie, there is a growing demand from galleries throughout Britain to have examples from his steadily expanding body of work to show and to sell.