Smash hit

His last big solo show was based around the works of Ossian, the mythical Celtic stories collected in the 19th century by James MacPherson, who was later accused of fakery. Coincidentally, Brewster married MacPherson’s daughter and Colvin says the themes of the two shows are similar. “It’s about the notion of invention, originality and how we see things. It’s about fact and fiction and how photography fits in.”

It is also about the priority of ideas. Brewster and Wheatstone had a long-running and very public quarrel, mainly conducted through the letters pages of The Times, about who first discovered stereoscopy.

“Brewster was argumentative, difficult, always falling out with everybody. He was very Scottish, quite an awkward character, as we can be. Wheatstone seemed to be a reasonable person, in that annoying way that English people can be. Reasonable, sensible level-headed, not like us. I was interested in the argument about who invented what first.”

This national rivalry is reflected in the artworks, with saltires and St George’s flags peeking out of corners. Colvin is also fascinated by the dynamism and diversity of the Victorian age, where art and science still overlapped.

“These guys were natural philosophers, they dabbled in everything. It’s not like today where everything is highly specialised. They had a holistic approach to the world. They interpreted things in a hopping-from-one-thing-to-the-next kind of fashion, much in the way that I do.”

Colvin is professor of fine art photography at the University of Dundee, having graduated from that city’s art college as a sculptor in 1983 and taken an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art in London.

He was one of a number of artists who emerged from Scotland to dazzle the world in the 1980s, the others being the painters Steven Campbell, Ken Currie, Peter Howson and the sculptor David Mach.

“In those days you had to get out of Scotland,” he says. “There was nothing going on apart from the dole . . . You went to London or the States to make your name. I was extremely ambitious, not for money but for my art. I wanted to get my stuff out on another stage and do something with it and London seemed a good place.”

It was an exhibition called Constructed Narratives with Ron O’Donnell at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, that made him famous.

“It was the premier documentary photography venue in the UK. People expected photography to be small, black and white, very Don McCullin. Ron was taking pictures of robots in the box office of Edinburgh’s Cameo cinema. I was doing my painted things. They were quite expressive, big, colourful very quirky. Some loved it and others were furious. People were pasting long essays into the comment book.”

He has always liked to play with classic paintings, some of his earlier work reinterpreted Botticelli’s Venus, Rubens’ Feast of Herod and Titian’s recently “rescued” Diana and Acteon. Scottish kitsch was another theme: the whole shortbread tin panoply of tartan, stags and Heilan’ hames. One recurring character in those days was a little kilted Action Man, who strode through Colvin’s anarchic sets like the hero in a comic book designed by Harry Lauder.

Twenty years ago, some critics simply didn’t understand.

“I had a show in Greece, which was reviewed in an English photography magazine. They said something like: ‘Nobody outside of the UK will understand his cultural references.’ I was reading it in a cafe in downtown Chicago, looking at the gable end of an old tenement building. It had a giant Scotsman with bagpipes painted on it.

“It was a whisky advert, a beautiful thing old and flaking. I thought, actually it is in England that they are suffering from some myopic view of the universe. Scotland exists, perhaps as a myth and perhaps as a Brigadoon, but it does exist in people’s minds and has a kind of presence in their imagination.”

He believes we are a culturally more confident place since he first began exhibiting.

“Artists played their part. They kept the flame alive, we haven’t turned into North Britain.” The preoccupation with national identity continues in Natural Magic but in more subtle ways. There is no kilted Action Man, he got lost on his travels through the cutting edge of art. “I don’t know what happened to him. I’m not sentimental about these things,” he laughs. “Right enough he could probably have earned me a bit of money on Ebay.”

Natural Magic by Calum Colvin is at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Monday to Saturday until April 5

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