I do not want to impose any particular restrictions, but imagine that they will be observational and photographic. The process will involve me carrying a camcorder at all times and I imagine that this may result in me looking more closely and reflecting more on my own daily activities and the world around me.

The videos will essentially be a sketch pad from which other ideas may or may not develop. I will try to do at least one a week, but the idea is to remove guidelines rather than create them.

Having returned from videoing and photographing a relatively remote Scottish Island named Rona, I had stopped off in Edinburgh to visit family. Interestingly I discovered there were two exhibitions investigating ways of representing Scotland’s unique landscapes. One from the ‘giant’ of modern painting Sean Scully and the other from 60 primary school pupils from Tollcross Primary School, Edinburgh and Bun-sgoil Shlète, Skye. Still with the alien and uncompromising landscape in my mind, it was with some surprise that it was the work of the school children that seemed more successful and inspiring.

Iona is an exhibition of a selection of paintings and one giant triptych that are the result of the impression the island left on Scully after a visit some years before. There is also a set of accompanying photographs of buildings from Lewis and Hariss which the artist visited twenty years ago. The paintings were produced in the artist’s studio in New York between 2004-2006 and are shown for the first time in the UK at Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh.

Ingleby’s location near the back of Waverley station gives it a strangely sombre appearance. It suggests the tiredness or sorrow of returning home rather than the buzz and excitement of leaving. This atmosphere is carried on into the large, minimalist and mainly empty gallery. Scully’s works are separated into a room of smaller paintings, a separate room for a selection of photographs (With a selection of the artists books displaying connected past projects) and a larger space upstairs to display the large triptych of paintings.

The exhibition as a whole feels like the gallery minimalist, careful and controlled. Scully regarded as an heir to the American Abstract expressionists, chooses to focus on the elements of geographic form and colour that he remembers of the landscape. For me and with Rona still in my mind, the exhibition captured little of the elemental, rugged and mysterious nature of a Scottish island. Nor did they suggest the overwhelming activity of life from the noise of the seabirds, wind and Sea around the Island to the array of natural life and vegetation growing from its ancient and layered rock.

The photographs (Taken on the Islands of Hariss and Lewis twenty years ago by the artist) are perhaps the most interesting element to the exhibition as they suggest some of the mystery of past habitation that is present on many of the Scottish Islands. Each photograph selects a fragment of the basic but colourful remaining buildings on Iona. Framed mechanically, close-up and without depth of focus, the images appear flat and painterly. Sculley’s focus reveals the interplay of line, colour and texture between the different elements of wood, glass, stone and corrugated Iron in the buildings. Scully suggests that “the fundamental difference between my working methods and those of the painters of the nineteenth century, who made travel sketches, is that I don’t use images of what I’ve photographed, only the emotions”. In this respect it is possible to see that the geometric patterns and supporting rectangular shapes featured in his photographs are continued into the paintings.The paintings appear to draw upon the minimal palette of colours found within the landscape of Iona. The Triptych is Scully’s monumental response to the effect of visiting the island. The triptych can be seen as a form of narrative in which the images relate or develop on from one another. Reading from left to right, Scully’s triptych begins with a dense flat plain of a sombre colour. The image appears impenetrable, a grey morning or stone wall waiting for the full light of day. The second painting is filled with warmer reds and browns.  The third painting returns to the greys and blues of the first. Each painting le the smaller works features bars of black, blue and grey organised in ordered rectangular pairs. Elements of lighter colour leak through the bars suggesting the beginning of a transformation. Taken together the paintings limited palette suggests the islands landscape tinted as it seems by the blue and grey of rock, light, sea and sky. In retrospect the images suggest a lamentable and impenetrable landscape, but one that has inspired Scully with the ambition to create such a large work. himself suggests that the connecting blocks and the relationship between the paintings attempts to reflect elemental transformations and convergences. ‘I try to paint this, this sense of the elemental coming together of land and sea, sky and land, of blocks coming together, side by side and stacked in horizon lines endlessly beginning and ending – the way the blocks of the world hug each other and brush up against each other, their weight, their air, their colour, and the soft uncertain space between them. I’m putting these into paintings.’ His description is perhaps more interesting than the slightly disappointing experience of standing in front of the paintings themselves that seem too minimal and subjective to reveal the magical and continually resonant real experience of actually standing on an island.

The Fruitmarket Gallery in opposition to the Ingleby, is buzzing with life, which similarly seems suited to its current exhibition Air Iomlaid (On Exchange). The exhibition is an education project involving 60 primary school pupils from Tollcross Primary School, Edinburgh and Bun-sgoil Shlète, Skye. This inspiring project was conceived by artist Julie Brook and The Fruitmarket Gallery’s Children and Young People’s Programme Manager Johnny Gailey. In the words of the Gallery ‘…following a process devised by Julie Brook, the project has involved the children in an intensive process of art tuition over 18 months. The children have learned to draw and paint outside in their own and each other’s environments, and to work up their immediate responses in individual and collaborative drawings and paintings, poetry, film and animation. This exhibition is a celebration of the project and an opportunity to present the children’s work’.

On the ground floor is a vast selection of the pupils work over the year as each school visited and responded through painting and drawing to the unique and diverse landscapes. Despite the variety of images, there is a unity to the work which testifies clearly to the high level of teaching involved. Accompanying this is an interesting and beautiful film of the process of the project and animations made by the pupils. It is rare to see an accessible show and of course work by children on such a scale, which perhaps makes the exhibition more impressive. Upstairs however is where the work really hits you in a way that the Iona triptych could only dream of doing.  Huge scale landscapes drawn collectively by the pupils in charcoal dominate the space. Filled with confidence and vibrancy, the detail and effort fill the viewer with awe allowing you or perhaps reminding you of what it is like to see the world as a child. Also included here, thankfully are the blue sketch pads of the pupils laid haphazardly around. There is none of the pretentiousness often present in the commercial galleries; the work in all its forms spreads out across the walls and pages with enthusiastic abandon.

Both exhibitions suggest how different our ways of seeing and responding to a landscape can be and the difficulty in communicating our findings to others. It also suggests something about the modern value of art. Although their appears to have been little press outside of the TES for the Air Iomlaid exhibition, Iona has been featured in most major magazines, and has been described as “one of the great paintings of the early 21st century”. It is perhaps more inspiring to see the accessible work of Air Iomlaid, art as education and art for arts sake rather than for the marketplace.

Air Iomlaid  runs until the 9th May at the Fruitmarket Gallery

Iona runs until June 26 at Inglebury Gallery