With his most recent works inspired by Pop Art and Surrealism, Ewan Douglas is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Forfar, Scotland. Under the banner of Albaland, and along with his alter-ego, Savage MacTavish, Ewan’s work seeks to highlight issues effecting Scotland, often exploring the paradoxical nature of Scottish identity and stereotype. Scotland’s landscape and its people are inextricably connected in their extremities. A nation of contradictions. Highland cows, twee tartan and tinned shortbread stereotypes propelled for a tourist trade stand in bleak contrast with more damaging representations, based on the dire socio-economic circumstances experienced by worrying numbers of its population. Beautiful, rolling hills of heather versus high-rise multis and housing schemes. A once oil rich nation with the highest numbers of deprivation in Europe. These unsavoury predicaments are handled by its inhabitants with a familiar dose of humour and self-deprecation (‘it’s the Scottish way’). It is from this stance that much of Ewan’s work derives.
