Artist Duncan Shanks launches new book.

For decades Duncan, one of Scotland's finest landscape painters, has depicted the area's waterfalls and glens in a long series of brilliant paintings.

But because he is publicity-shy, and wary of the social demands that come from being involved in the art world and all its trappings, his profile is not as high as it should be.

All of that looks likely to change, however, with a new exhibition that opens in Glasgow on March 14. An authoritative new book is being published at the same time.

His entire collection of 106 sketchbooks from the last 55 years, containing some 6,500 drawings and gifted to Glasgow University's Hunterian Art Gallery, will go on show there.

The book, The Poetry of Place contains dozens of his sketches, their subjects ranging from Davingill burn in spate to 'Carmichael Road, Tinto, morning' is being published at the same time.

The exhibition and the book both involve Anne Dulau Beveridge, curator of pre-1945 French and British Art at The Hunterian since 1997.

She has come to know Duncan well since 2008, when contact was first made with him to discuss the possible gift of his sketchbooks.

"What Duncan has said to me, again and again," says Beveridge, "is the fact that he works for himself. He was determined to find a new way of looking at landscape. He didn't want to do what had already been done by others.

"He has great facility as a draughtsman and a very good eye. He is very good at quickly capturing what catches his eye. But he isn't interested in the commercial aspect of the art world."

Duncan was born in Airdrie 78 years ago and was raised in Uddingston. He studied at Glasgow School of Art between 1955 and 1960. In his final year there he met Una Gordon, a fellow artist who would become his wife.

In 1961 he began to work as GSA as a part-lecturer. He and Una married in 1966 and the following year they set up home in Davingill House, at Crossford.

The sketchbooks have more than 500 drawings of the couple's remarkable garden alone.

In the decades since he has detailed every aspect of the picturesque Clyde Valley and its "beautiful diversity" and its "ancient and unpopulated" landscapes.

He does this in all weathers, too. Not even the two freezing winters of 2010 and 2011 could deter him from venturing out of doors, sketchbook in hand.

Duncan has risked life and limb to capture the Falls of Clyde - one of his favourite locations, alongside Tinto Hill. He has sought shelter under a rocky outcrop on Tinto as the rain and the cold made their presence felt.

"I have never had to travel far for inspiration," he says in the book. "A need for solitude has attracted me to unpeopled places, where man's intervention is least apparent - the haunts of dippers and goosander by the river, fox in the glen, hare on the hilltop and buzzard and hawks in the clouds above the thorn edges of the valley."

Says Anne: "From the 18th century onwards, there's a fair amount of history and tradition of painters visiting the Clyde Valley.

"Here at the university the Foulis Academy of Art and Design was created in the 18th century, and its students would go along the Clyde river and the local castles.

"Duncan was very aware of the artists who had been to the Falls of Clyde before him. Turner was there and a lot of Scottish landscape artists in that century also saw the falls for themselves.

"He has however, a unique way of depicting the falls. And Tinto Hill is truly something that does not seem to have been tackled by artists before as a subject matter.

"It's the same with the distant reservoirs and burns that he discovered thanks to his wife's work with schools - she trained teachers in remote schools across the area.

"It has been a pleasure for me to follow in his footsteps," says Anne. "I've discovered parts of Scotland I might not otherwise have gone to. What they all have in common is their wilderness, their remoteness.

"Any evidence of man's existence is slight. What signs there are - are echoes of the past - of more ancient times. I think that this idea is something that really interests Duncan. So is the interweaving of his personal associations with a place into the patterns of its landscape.

"You and I will probably not see that, but it's an important part of the way that he triggers his imagination and that he gets inspiration."

The Clyde Valley is not some remote and inaccessible part of Scotland but is just a moderate drive from Glasgow. Nevertheless, it is an area that Duncan has made its own. As you read this, he is probably out of doors once again, drawn by the ever-changing landscape.

As he himself puts it, in the new book: "Working in harmony with nature in my notebooks has been an act of faith and an adventure which has taken me to and beyond the poetry of place on a personal odyssey."

* Duncan Shanks Sketchbooks, Hunterian Art Museum, March 14 - August 16. Admission free. The Poetry of Place: Duncan Shanks's Sketchbooks and the Upper Clyde, will be published by Freight Books in hardback at £15.99.