On Painting, Persistence & Returning to Things | The Sunday Journal No.6

Elizabeth Cameron painting, 2026

Spending time with Elizabeth Cameron recently felt a little like stepping into another rhythm of life.

Conversation moved gently from Edinburgh College of Art to holidays in Italy, living in a Perthshire rectory, favourite teachers and the quiet certainty of returning, always, to painting.

Elizabeth is elegant, impeccably mannered, funny and incredibly charming. The kind of person who leaves you feeling as though conversation has unfolded at an entirely more civilised pace than the current world generally allows.

She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1968, studying at a time when disciplines (and often genders) were still distinctly divided. Fashion and textiles formed much of her training, though painting endured alongside it. Her teachers included figures who now feel woven into the fabric of Scottish art education: anatomy professor Sir Robin Philipson, always remembered in a bow tie, Dame Elizabeth Blackadder for painting, and Kathleen Horsman MBE for ceramics.

She married in the term she graduated while completing her final year of art college and, as she tells it, life moved in another direction. Wife, mother, teacher. The sort of path that, particularly then, could stand in the way of ambition and yet, painting never really left.

Listening to Elizabeth speak, what emerges is not the story of a career pursued in a straight line, but one repeatedly and regularly returned to.

There were years in Sydney, where university buildings and native flora found their way into paintings. Later, Perthshire, with cathedral silhouettes and changing skies, and now the Borders, where shifting seasons, distant hills and the sudden brightness of oilseed rape fields continue to find their way onto the canvas.

But it was holidays that seemed to occupy a particularly special place in Elizabeth’s memory.

Elizabeth Cameron, A Cluster of Homes, Tuscany 

She described travelling, with her husband Peter, through Scotland, Italy and France. Elizabeth would paint, not hurriedly, and not as documentation exactly, but as a response to the world around her in which she so clearly finds inspiration.

Elizabeth Cameron, Evening Light Tuscany

One of the loveliest things she told me was that they don’t really have holiday albums in the conventional sense. Instead, they have albums of paintings. Sketches, studies, fragments of places visited together, which Elizabeth routinely returns flips through for reference.

Elizabeth Cameron, Albums

And perhaps that feels key to understanding the work. Elizabeth paints attentively, but without urgency. There’s an openness to it that I find appealing - particularly in the less finished paintings, where something remains unresolved and shifting.

 

Elizabeth Cameron, Les Chats Study

 

Elizabeth Cameron, Les Chats. Available at The Torrance Gallery

In Les Chats - currently part of our Local Characters exhibition due to end next Friday 30th May - Elizabeth explained how the two cats were actually the same feline captured in movement after remembering a tutor encouraging the class to draw figures in motion.

And so her work is classic in sensibility, but never rigid. There’s confidence in the colour - hollyhocks and lilies from her garden, west coast skies, cathedral stone, distant mountains softened by weather - yet room for something unexpected to remain.

 

Arrangement of flowers from Elizabeth's garden, 2026

 

“You remove yourself into yourself,” she said, “and become other. The painting tells you what to do and it arrives.”

It reminds me of a liminal space, as if the process of painting produces an entirely new state of being upon stepping back from the canvas.

Because perhaps that’s what stays with me most about Elizabeth. Not grand artistic statements or carefully constructed mythology, but the sense of someone who has simply kept returning to making. Through changing homes, changing roles, changing seasons of life.

And perhaps now, quietly, feels like something of a moment. Elizabeth said to me, with a smile, that she feels this is finally her time. I found that rather wonderful. Not in the sense of arrival exactly, but of permission - after a lifetime of returning to painting, to allow it to take up space again.

She still speaks about art with complete certainty:

“Without art on the walls or an easel,” she says, “life would be very dull.”