Glen Onwin RSA is a distinguished Scottish artist working with ideas involving the landscape, geology and the elemental make-up of the planet.
Born in Edinburgh in 1947, Onwin studied Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art (1966-1970). Following a period teaching in secondary education he returned to the college and is now a professor. Onwin became fascinated by salt marshes, not as the subject of conventional landscape painting, but rather as a phenomenon to study with a quasi-scientific approach. He is interested in the structures behind appearances: microscopic images, crystalline forms, and the slow changes of materials over time.
Glen Onwin RSA: From formlessness to a study of a salt marsh near Dunbar to explorations of the basic substance of salt and its meaning both physical and psychological; the increasing changes to our planet’s subtle ecology brought about through human activity; from earth, air, fire and water, from Hydrogen to element 118 Ununoctium; in my creative practice I am interested in exploring the means by which we have attempted and still attempt to understand and derive meaning from the physical world we inhabit and its relationship to the cosmos.