John Lowrie Morrison is the wildly popular Scottish landscape artist whose work — or so say his numerous critics — seldom saw a provincial restaurant wall or dentist’s waiting room it didn’t suit.

Swift and prolific in his production of canvasses, knocking out hundreds a year, Morrison is as famed now for his fiscal turnover as his paintings, which tend to be the visual equivalent of easy listening, blithe and cheerful in their depictions of candy-hued Highland scenes. He’s the ultimate purveyor of a snazzy trad, hand-tooled for every gift shop and suburban gallery north of the Tweed.

That turnover, apparently, is in the region of £2m annually, money of a kind that buys anyone a few indulgences. Hence the Jolomo awards, christened for the syllabically contracted tradename under which Morrison paints. The 60-year-old artist is passionate about Scottish landscape painting in the way Salvador Dali was passionate about melting clocks. Morrison is zealous about the discipline, in fact, not to say evangelical. And so since 2007, he has underwritten the annual competition founded in 2006, in which prizes totalling £30,000 are disbursed to young landscape artists living and working in Scotland.

“The brutal truth,” says Morrison, “is that in 10 or 20 years’ time, the ranks of Scotland’s landscape painters, myself included, will be dead. We’re a bit like original Gaelic-speakers, a dying breed.

“There may be arguments for and against landscape painting, and for or against conceptual Charles Saatchi art,” he adds. “I'm just not interested in the arguments, not in the least. I love Scottish landscape painting and I want to see it live on. Unmade beds and bananas on a windowsill? I just don’t get it.”

The Jolomo awards are the largest privately funded painting prize in Britain and so, understandably, it comes with a few conditions. It’s as much a didactic enterprise as a philanthropic one. It’s intended to make the argument that modern art needn't be limited to jewel-encrusted skulls, that it can incorporate the occasional picturesque farmhouse or basking otter, too.

The awards are a shameless plug for Morrison’s chosen medium, the nice old-fashioned landscape, and it’s two paint-stained fingers up at the neophiliacs of BritArt, with their video installations and their dubious sexual hygiene. You won’t be surprised to learn that Prince Charles was approached in the award’s early stages to serve on the judging panel — although he was unable to take part. With this year’s nominees about to go on display ahead of the final next month, the award, then, is a sort of anti-Turner prize, the revenge of the affronted.

Morrison is more than affronted by modern art, in fact. A committed Christian since a born-again experience in the 1960s, he goes as far as saying that he sees something diabolic in modern-day conceptual art, something in flagrant opposition to the harmonious unities of traditional art: “As a Christian, I feel there’s great order to things in the world and I don’t think conceptual art is part of that order. I don’t know if it’s anti-Christian but it’s certainly anti-order. Just sticking some bits of wood on a gallery floor doesn’t do it for me at all. An old, traditional, conservative guy like me has to conclude the artists are just trying to be slick and cool and to outdo their competitors.”

Though the first prize is £20,000, Morrison claims the true dent to his pocket after organisational costs is closer to £100,000. The awards are open to all landscape painters either born in Scotland or who attended art school here, or who live and work here now. Rigorous questioning of what a nominee would do with any prize money features in the selection process; the winner of the 2007 award, Anna King, used her cash to relocate and paint landscapes in Russia, a scenario Morrison is less than keen to see repeated.

Morrison, incidentally, turned to Christ after witnessing Cliff Richard and Edward Fox perform an impromptu dramatic rendering of the crucifixion in 1969 at the Tron Church in Glasgow: “It was just lovely. I’ll never forget it, even though there was some mime involved,” he says. “I remember Fox acting out the crucifixion on a huge wooden cross attached to the wall. Something in the image spoke to me, unlike the arrangements of wood I see on gallery floors these days.”

Like the stopped clock that’s correct twice a day, though, Morrison may yet be finding his stance endorsed in the wider culture. A Turner-rivalling prize announced by arch-modernist Charles Saatchi at the beginning of the decade has yet to materialise; the Turner prize itself, meanwhile, is now dubbed by some in the art world the Flatline prize to recognise that its conceptual novelties no longer create the impact they did once. Stuckist, a movement founded in 1999 to promote figurative art, has claimed that the Turner is on an “anti-painting crusade”.

Coincidentally or not, the Turner shortlist announced three weeks ago featured three artists who work in traditional, non-conceptual media, including two based in Glasgow: Richard Wright, a fresco painter, and the sculptor Lucy Skaer. Morrison, though, remains on edge: “I talk to the people I know who’re running art schools now and friends from my days in educational administration and they assure me painting is still on the curriculum as part of a broad church that includes conceptual art and everything else. What I’d actually like to see, though, is a return to the centrality that painting had in art schools in its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s.”

Gratifyingly, the nominees for this year’s Jolomo award do show formal separation from the staid and slavish tendencies of landscape painting. It’s all some distance from the genre’s typical front-parlour sentimentalism. Rosanne Barr, of Invergowrie, a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, has submitted Rain Shower Ahead, a grand finger-painted kaleidoscope in oils; Cherry Blossom by the Glasgow school of Art graduate Jack Frame has the graphic hyper-reality of tinted photography; Towards Park Circus by Alastair Strachan is a woozy infant-school Glasgow cityscape; while View From Leith by Toby Cooke turns the port into a Mondrian-like arrangement of geometric planes. The Forest in Summer by Claudia Massie and On The Luss Hills, Early March by Keith Salmon both convert landscapes into impressionistic washes.

With ages averaging in the mid-twenties and most fresh from art school, the short-listed nominees seem to constitute a new breed, determined to find something vital in the maligned school of landscape. Barr, for instance, worked like her contemporaries conceptually while a student, then switched to representational art. “My degree show was all conceptual and I thought I quite liked it. But I didn’t feel proud of it as I do with my paintings,” she says. “With conceptual art, we felt we always were trying to please the tutors and fit in with what they said was the style of the day.”

Cooke has just graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art and is the youngest nominee at 22, as well as perhaps the most abstract and least traditional. He’s comfortable, he says, competing for an award conceived by a painter as artistically conservative as Jolomo. “I don’t know that much about his work,” says Cooke, “but I like it. He’s made the mainstream see what he can see in the landscape of Scotland and that’s a big achievement.

“Plus,” Cooke adds, “I live in Edinburgh, and in the galleries here, selling for vast sums, you do see an awful lot worse than Jolomo.”

The Jolomo Award nominees are on display from Friday at Henry Duncan House, 120 George Street, Edinburgh, until next Sunday

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