On Familiar Streets & A Playful Eye | The Sunday Journals No.14
Painting in public requires a certain amount of good humour which Craigo has in spades.
There is no studio door to close and no hiding the awkward middle stages. People stop to watch, ask questions and offer opinions. Buses move, light changes and, just as you begin to settle into a view, a delivery van inevitably parks directly in front of it.
Craigo, painting en plein air. July 2026.
I recently joined Craigo for a spell of painting en plein air in Edinburgh’s New Town. Watching him work, what struck me most was the playfulness of it all.
Craigo painting St Stephen's Stockbridge, en plein air, July 2026.
His paintings are immediately recognisable.
Streets, skylines and familiar Edinburgh landmarks are held together by confident drawing and a strong graphic sensibility, but colour is allowed to have its own say.
Craigo, Royal Circus, 2025. Available at The Torrance Gallery.
Buildings lean a little more characterfully, skies become more theatrical and ordinary corners of the city take on a warmth and energy that feel unmistakably his.
Craigo began focusing more seriously on his painting practice in 2019. He had already spent years working within creative industries, but during the pandemic he made the decision to devote himself to painting full time.
That background in design still shows. There is a clarity to his compositions and an instinctive understanding of how an image should hold together. Yet the work never feels overly controlled. Its charm lies in the balance between structure and spontaneity - the recognisable city and the imaginative version of it that emerges through paint.
Close up of underpainting, July 2026.
What I enjoyed most in our conversation was his openness about where inspiration comes from. Craigo speaks readily about artists and teachers whose work has prompted him to look again or try something differently. Not because his own visual language lacks confidence, but because curiosity is clearly part of his practice.
He mentioned being particularly inspired by Al Bell’s recent exhibition, Places, at the gallery. Al’s movement between realism and abstraction encouraged Craigo to experiment with making his rendering of light less literal and allowing more whimsical elements to enter the work. And it works brilliantly, as seen in a recent commission of Edinburgh from Braid Hill.
I rather like the idea of that exchange happening within the gallery.
We tend to think of exhibitions as conversations between artists and audiences, but artists are always looking at one another too. One painting can loosen something in another person’s thinking, offer permission to exaggerate, simplify or take an unexpected turn. Influence need not mean imitation. Sometimes it simply opens another door.
That willingness to play feels central to Craigo’s work. His paintings are accomplished, but they never feel solemn. There is colour, movement and an evident enjoyment of the places he paints. He captures familiar streets without treating them as fixed architectural records. Instead, they become stages on which light, weather and personality can perform.
Craigo, La Vucciria, 2026. Available at The Torrance Gallery.
Craigo told me that he once wondered whether his work would connect with younger audiences. In practice, the response has been quite the opposite.
During painting demonstrations at Anthropologie, he found younger collectors drawn to the bright palette and to scenes they could recognise immediately. There is something wonderfully accessible about seeing a street you know translated through someone else’s imagination. Recognition draws you in; colour and character make you stay.
Craigo, Lannan, 2026. Available at The Torrance Gallery.
The demonstrations themselves must have played a part too. Watching a painting emerge removes some of the distance that can surround art. You see the decisions being made—the mark changed, the colour heightened, the building nudged slightly away from reality—and begin to understand that a finished painting is not simply found. It is constructed through hundreds of small acts of looking and choosing.
We will certainly be persuading Craigo to paint in the gallery before too long.
For now, I keep returning to the way he approaches Edinburgh: as a painter of familiar streets, with colour, warmth and an increasingly playful eye.
His city is recognisable, but never predictable.
And I suspect that is exactly why so many people recognise something of their own Auld Reekie within it.