Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston studied together at ECA while Gillies was still actively teaching at the college. They both went on to teach there under his guidance as Head of the School of Drawing and Painting and later as Principal. As the next artists of the Edinburgh School, Blackadder and Houston extended Gillies’ influence to new generations of students. Marrying in 1956, they became a hugely influential couple in Scottish painting.
In 1954 they followed in Gillies’ footsteps on a travelling scholarship to Italy and their work from the period shows affinity with his style. International travel became an important part of both artist’s practice, particularly Blackadder’s through the objects she collected from all over the world, which featured in her still life paintings. But in Scotland, a visit to Lewis and Harris in 1974 was particularly fruitful and led to a rich series of landscapes, where she experimented with her own watercolour based abstractions.