Growing up in Braidwood, an unremarkable village in the Clyde Valley, Blair Thomson discovered a novel way to escape dreary Lanarkshire. He fell in love with the black and white movies of Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. The Seven Samurai and his dark, moody version of Macbeth, Throne of Blood, were favourites. “They were on TV very late at night,” he recalls. “I used to creep up in the small hours to record them.”

Later, studying at Glasgow School of Art, Thomson discovered Japanese portraiture, calligraphy and poetry. In his final year there he met Maiko Tanaka, who was studying English in the city. “I think she was quite surprised,” he recalls, “to find someone in Glasgow who knew more about some aspects of Japanese culture than she did.”

Eight years on, Thomson has become an unofficial member of the Tanaka family. By a hugely fortuitous coincidence, Maiko’s 89-year-old grandfather is a master calligrapher. Having overcome his initial hesitancy — the family loved Thomson’s sketchy works in ink but were less sure of his larger, more abstract oils — Wakabayashi Sensei is teaching him sho calligraphy and mark-making, a form of sketching that uses tools similar to those involved in calligraphy.

Having visited Japan several times since meeting Maiko, Thomson can now see an eastern influence seeping into all his work. Every aspect is affected: technique, mindset, subject matter. He has always been drawn to the built environment, especially at the point when it starts to disintegrate. “At art school I painted wide vistas and landscapes but then I became more interested in man-made things.” Piers are a favourite. “I like it when they’ve started to break down, quiet places that have been forgotten about.”

Since becoming immersed in Japanese culture, Thomson has invested this rich subject material with a new sensibility. He is interested in poets — particularly the 17th-century writer Matsuo Basho and the 13th-century philosopher Eihei Dogen — and attempts to bring their Zen perspective to his 21st-century studio in Glasgow city centre.

“I suppose it is a Zen thing, a way of seeing the world,” he says. “I like their open-mindedness, their simplicity, their sense of nature. They have a way of combining an infinite idea with something you notice quite suddenly. They talk about that in haiku, they call it the inconsequential essential moment. I’m trying to get that into my work. I’m not sure I’m quite there yet.”

It’s not that Thomson has swapped his rotten beams and dilapidated buildings for cherry blossom and views of Mount Fuji, or given up oils in favour of working solely with inks and brushes. “I still like the same things: the pier at Kilcreggan in Argyll, or the one at Bowling, beside the Erskine Bridge, have always been favourites. But now I try to relate them to nature, and look at the way they’re surrounded by nature. I try to retain their dynamism, the initial impact I found when I saw them.”

Japanese architecture and cityscapes have also cast their spell over Thomson. On his last trip, at the turn of the year, he filled several sketchbooks with images of Tokyo’s telecommunication towers, Matsumoto-jo Castle and a twisted cherry tree that he found nearby.

He has become something of a devotee of such castles and was initially terribly excited to find the landscape dotted with them. Then he discovered that most were fakes, built to look like originals that had been flattened after the second world war. “They are tourist destinations with car parks inside,” he says disdainfully. There are, however, 11 originals left and he and his sketchbook are working their way around them.

On his way back from Japan he was so full of creative brio that, unable to sit still during a six-hour wait at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, he started drawing the tail of an MD-11 jet. When he got home, he was still pacing around looking for things to scribble. Finnieston crane caught his eye, and he reconfigured it in the Japanese calligraphic style.

Back in his studio, Thomson has used his sketches to make six enormous ink pieces, each 2 sq m, to be hung together in a solo show, Trailing the North Wind, at Glasgow Art Club. “I think they will have quite an impact,” he says. “It has taken me a few years to get the hang of this style of calligraphy but I think I’m finally taking this way of mark-making into my painting. There is life coming into my marks.”

Trailing the North Wind, Glasgow Art Club, No 185 Bath Street, May 1-29

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