A MIX of the unusual has helped create a new exhibition by one of Scotland's top artists in Glasgow, which has already been described as "stunning".

John McKechnie, director of the Glasgow Print Studio which is hosting the the big-draw exhibition, summed up: "There aren't many people who won't like a show like this, it's stunning."

Cats, crustaceans and beautiful wild flowers ... it could only be the work of one of Scotland's greatest living artists, Dame Elizabeth Blackadder.

The showcase of her printmaking spans more than five decades, covering techniques from lithography and etching to aquatint, dry point, woodcut and screenprint.

There are exquisite irises, tulips and lilies, dancing across the paper; perfectly placed lines of fish, some inspired by chocolate treats wrapped in shining jewel-coloured foil; boxes or wriggling lobsters and elegant langoustines.

"Her links with Glasgow Print Studio go back to 1984, not long after I became director and I invited her to come in and work," explains John.

"What's interesting is that she really took to printmaking and has kept going all these years.

"You have to have a certain patience with printmaking, it's a bit like chess, you're doing things knowing that eventually it's going to look like this rather than taking a brush and making the mark.

"You have to think ahead so you have to think what the ramifications of what you're doing now are going to be at each later stage.

"Like chess, you have to think out your moves ahead, you have to look to the end result and know what you have to do eventually to get there.

"Also you tend to be working in negative and also working as a mirror image if you're working on an etching. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to do that."

Elizabeth's earliest work on show dates back to about 1986 to a time when she had only made a few lithographs.

The pictures of her beloved cats and botanical studies of flowers are quintessential Blackadder.

"She has a love of cats so there are a lot of images of them, mostly her own," says John. "And there are a lot of botanical studies of flowers - she has a very distinctive way of doing them.

"They are usually worked on over quite a long period of time and tend to be groups of flowers, so you might have lilies but they wouldn't be in a vase, they would be more like a sketchbook. Some are very precise with every little stamen, others are more loose and freer.

"Lots of people do cats and flowers but they way she does them there is something about them that people just home in on right away."

Every piece of work is meticulously hand-crafted and many of the print works have been completed over several years. Old favourites include the graceful and sometimes whimsical cats including Fred lying on top of a cupboard and the wonderful Amelia Sleeping, in which the playful cat lounges on its back with all four paws in the air.

"She's fantastic at capturing they way a cat looks because cats are not that easy if you're doing them in a realistic way," observes John.

"They're beautifully done. It's easy to do a caricature of a cat but a proper picture of a cat is much more difficult."

New work includes the precise Wild Flower, like something from a Victorian botanical book; as well as a series of black-and-white etchings from Venice and Rome.

Among the boats and domes rooftops are the obligatory cats and shellfish.

"There is a relatively recent one called Irises, an etching which features a technique called spit bite," explains John.

"It's an etching but within etching there are lots of different variations. With spit bite you actually paint with acid on to the plate. Elizabeth's work has rich purples and the greens of the stems.

"A lot of her work sells out. She has done something like 150 different images with us over the years and they do sell out so with some of them the one on the wall is the only one left."

angela.mcmanus @eveningtimes.co.uk

n Elizabeth Blackadder - Etchings and Screenprints is at Glasgow Print Studio, Trongate 103, Glasgow, until October 5