Virtuoso puts the ordinary in a new light

The cover of Robert M Pirsig’s enigmatic 1974 novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance shows a spanner morphing into a flower. Pirsig wrote: “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”

One of the paintings by Peter Thomson, the Glasgow-based artist who was born in 1962, also depicts a spanner. It’s a small work, oil on linen, about 20cm square, entitled Multi tool. The spanner is in the foreground, where it casts an equivalent shadow; the style is vaguely postimpressionist, because the lines and outlines are ill defined. There’s no apparent context and we must make our own inferences as to meaning.

Elsewhere, other oils give clues to the painter’s intent and intellectual situation. Combing the Hair (after Degas) and Hendricke Bathing (after Rembrandt) situate Thomson’s work as part of a tradition that values depiction, craft, observation and painterliness. He describes these as “tributes” and “cover versions”.

The Japanese painter Hokusai elected to depict all things, and this range, intellectual ambition and non-hierarchical approach affected European art. Degas was one of those who was influenced. Such a credo may apply to Thomson, a craftsman and thoughtful artist, who applies his skills to depicting scrapyards, workshops, interior spaces, landscape, dismantled TVs and much more.

In one work, from which this show takes its name, he paints an urban scene at night. It’s one of many amalgams of reality and imagination. The focus is a telephone box, which is in the middle ground, off-set to the right. A bright light emanates from within, contrasting with the yellow streetlights. Is there something to this work other than mimesis? Thomson is cagey about expressing religious or spiritual views but there is a sense, as in Pirsig’s interpretation of Buddhism, that the artist wishes to celebrate the “ordinariness” of things.

By doing so, he puts them in a new light, literally. There is beauty all around. But it needs an artist of this quality to illuminate it.

To April 28