WASPS Dovehill Studios artists on show at Leiper Fine Art

From haunting portraits to atmospheric landscapes, complex oil paintings to digital drawings, they span a wealth of styles and media, coming together to celebrate one important moment: 35 years since the opening of the WASPS Dovehill Studios in East Campbell Street, Glasgow.

Running until early March, it is a showcase of the talent in the city, championed by the pioneering organisation that now offers studio space to 800 visual artists as well as arts charities.

Glasgow School of Art trained Tommy Lydon is showing two portraits, perfect examples of the incredible amount of time and painstaking research put into his work.

The first captures an image of German illustrator and sculptor Kathe Kollwitz, one of the foremost artists of social protest in the 20th century who passionately dedicated her work to documenting historic rebellions again social injustice and created many self-portraits before her death in 1945.

"When I am painting these portraits I do a lot of research into the people, I read books and collect photographs and usually they take quite a few gos before I get them," explains Tommy.

"It is a long time before the person materialises in front of you because it's not just about a photographic physical likeness, it's something else I can't explain.

"People have used all kinds of words for it but I have copied photographs of her and they don't look like her but this looks like her."

So challenged was Tommy by the portrait of revolutionary German artist Joseph Beuys, he admits it ended up in the bin a few times when he was working in Dusseldorf and back in Scotland.

"This picture took a long time: 13 years on and off. It just wouldn't work," he admits. "Sometimes things just don't work and you give up. Somehow, and I can't tell you why, I think, 'Yes, that's what I wanted it to look like.'

"He was hidden away for about six years and I got him back out again. The reason I do a lot of portraits of other artists is it's me trying to integrate their work and my own and synthesise the two. I feel a wee bit of me in them."

Tommy was integral in the setting up of WASPS 35 years ago, at a time when the arts community realised workshop space was needed for the growing number of art school graduates.

There are 46 artists based at East Campbell Street in the East End of Glasgow and the demand for studio space never eases.

"When we got the first building in King Street there were 16 studios and there was always at least one of them empty," remembers Tommy. "Now we have 500 and there is a huge waiting list."

James McDonald's oil on canvas Mechanism of a Face dominates one wall of the West George Street gallery.

Chemical instruments portraying images of a woman overlap and collide on the giant canvas.

The name of the work is taken from a line in Macbeth: "There is no art to find the mind's construction in the face."

"It is a concatenation of glass reflecting my studio and the activities within it," says James. "I have worked on it over a period of two years and I'm not sure if it's actually finished.

"Soap bubbles reflect the studio and the final things added were milk drops which came from a book on Salvador Dali's working methods using high-speed photography to capture milk splashing.

"The whole thing is fairly abstract."

Two oil paintings in the window are typical of James's dark, intense style. While oil on canvas Koryusai Kolours is named after the Japanese woodblock artist.

A girl dressed in overalls mops a floor, the lightness of the warm pearlescent colours is a contrast to the other pieces he is showing in the gallery.

One of a pair of paintings, James refers to it as pound shop couture, as everything worn and used by the girl came from the bargain store.

"This group exhibition has been a good showcase, there has been a lot of interest," he says." The feedback has been amazing, I've heard from people far and wide. I got an email from New Zealand yesterday. Somebody had bought one of my paintings in 1991 and wanted to find out more about this show."

In contrast, artist Roy Petrie is showing two digital drawings, printed at Glasgow Print Studio.

Scotia, with a map of Scotland painted into the face of Venus is Roy's response to research that had come out of the University of Strathclyde's Centre for Confidence and Well-being.

"I buy the idea that we are lacking in confidence as a nation," he says." I was thinking about the symbol of European confidence - we are often compared to European societies unfavourably - and the height of European confidence to me would be the Renaissance period. One of the principal artists there was Botticelli and this is his image of Venus, the most beautiful, successful, and civilised of women."

The digital drawings are a new technique for Roy, who usually paints. Original pieces of artwork, they are not digital reproductions of paintings.

His other piece of work of show, Gandolfi Night, captures the quiet moments at the end of a busy day in one of the Merchant City's best-known restaurants.

When the last customers had gone, Roy was allowed to sit in a corner and capture images of the staff relaxing.

"The lights are dimmed and it is only flickering candlelight, so the place has a hallucinatory quality," he explains.

"I took that to its extreme. The fish on the window appear to swim in the stained glass. While a girl is doing a last check before she finishes and her friend is sitting waiting for her. She casts a shadow; you can just see her profile."

WASPS Dovehill Studios Artists, Leiper Fine Art, 117 West George Street, Glasgow. www.leiperfineart.com