THERE is something wonderfully refreshing about a young artist who doesn't feel the need to chase the exotic looking for inspiration.

Katie Pope says she has found everything she needs for her work right her in Glasgow.

Bubbling with enthusiasm, the 30-year-old former Aspect Prize winner describes how she finds an endless source of material in the everyday then uses it to breathe life into the sketches and large canvases that fill her studio in the city centre.

There are recurring themes of cityscapes with whirling circles of traffic fringed by towering blocks of flats and rows of tenements. In one sketch an old man sits outside Poundland with a bag full of supernoodles and novelty Elvis glasses and in another seagulls feast on the remains of a McDonald's happy meal. She celebrates all forms of life in the city, often focusing on those living on the margins.

"I depict all aspects of Glasgow life; the people, where they live, all kind of mundane things," she says. "It's about finding beauty in everyday things. I like people, I've always been fascinated by their quirks. You can sit on a bus journey and see everything but no-one is noticing it."

She adds: "I've always liked writers such as Alan Bennett and Edwin Morgan. I think it was Edwin Morgan who first got me thinking about my surroundings when I realised he had written a poem about the pigeons in George Square. That got me thinking, I can make art out of my life. You don't need to have these grand, high ideas."

After participating in a group show in Edinburgh, Katie is now preparing for a solo exhibition in Glasgow later this year. Her work embraces the city she grew up in and loved so much she moved back in her final year at Edinburgh College of Art because she missed Glasgow so much.

She won the Aspect Prize in 2008 with Buddha and Dogs, her portrait of a local man in Motherwell, where her parents now live, complete with baseball cap, bottle of Irn-Bru and pit bull terriers.

"It was a big six-foot painting that went down to London. All my paintings were of Motherwell, a wee housing scheme, and they were on show in this posh gallery in London," she laughs.

The walls of her bright, light-filled studio are filled with paintings in progress. One is of the view from her old flat on Wilton Street in the west end: a basketball court fringed by trees in blazing autumn colours, cocooned by tenements.

"Sometimes people say, 'Why do you paint Glasgow?' but there are a lot of stunning views, even the tenements.

" I've lived in a tenement and there's something I really love about them. I like it when you go into a close and you can smell what everyone is having for dinner; all these other things going on."

A huge canvas under the window depicts a snowy street scene in Greenock and Katie admits she gets lost in the detail and stories of what's happening in the rows of back gardens and lamp-lit living rooms as she works on the painting for a while, then leaves it for a few weeks and returns again to add more detail.

The 30-year-old grew up in Priesthill in the 1980s. "A lively community," she laughs, that left an indelible image of rich characters that still inform her work. "You knew everyone and there were stories in every house and you would soak it all up."

She remembers watching Bill Forsyth's Gregory's Girl and the revelation that a film could be made about teenagers and everyday life in Scotland.

"I like Scottish culture," she says proudly, and she doesn't mean tartan and bagpipes. "Writer and poets make work about what's around them so why shouldn't I?"

She now runs an art class for adults with learning disabilities and finds new ideas for her work every day, whether sitting on the bus or in the Tesco cafe in Maryhill.

More recently she has started doing illustrations and words for album sleeve notes for bands, including her own The Just Joans.

"At art school you're told there should be no words within your painting but I like words, so that's something I've been working on, thinking about stories and books."

She has had the opportunity to spread her wings and spent three months in Florence after winning a travel award from the Royal Scottish Academy.

Initial fears that the location didn't suit her style of painting - because it was too sunny - were quickly dispelled when she decided to treat it as an exercise in life drawing and still maintain her own view.

"In the end it was so good for my work because it made me think, you're not just about Glasgow, you can go anywhere.

"You'll just have your own vision and when you go somewhere you have a wee Scottish twist on it."

To find our more about Katie's work visit www.katiepope.co.uk

angela.mcmanus@eveningtimes.co.uk