ARTISTS TALKING

The painter Callum Innes will be forty this year, and a major show of his work will shortly begin touring American museums. Innes was shortlisted for the Jerwood and Turner prizes in 1995 and won the NatWest Painting Prize in 1998. These days his abstract paintings are in collections worldwide from Canberra to Cleveland, Ohio. He is best known for the technique of 'unpainting' including his series of Exposed Paintings in which he uses turpentine to dissolve away pigments on the canvas, leaving an uncertain, fluctuating picture surface with a strong physical presence.

In career terms Innes is remarkable for being among one of a new generation of artists who have developed international reputations without moving to London, New York or another traditional centre of the art market. Since graduation Innes has remained in his hometown of Edinburgh, proving that despite the pressure on young artists to head south, it has become perfectly possible to think global and live local.

Innes is well known in Scotland for his strong views about the importance of supporting young artists. He sat on the Visual Arts Committee of the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) for a number of years and as a research fellow at Glasgow School of Art has plenty of student contact: "I always say to my students, for God's sake, apply for every grant or show going," he explains "it's so important to make sure you take every opportunity to get your work known."

As an emerging artist Innes was an inveterate form-filler: "I remember one year I filled in thirty-five applications and didn't get a single result." He had started out wanting to study in a college like Chelsea, but the difficulty of obtaining a student grant for a traditional foundation course meant he eventually studied for his degree at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen. It was, he says, a very good move. A young painting department and a lack of formal structure allowed him to develop his practice with support and encouragement.

Like many painters who studied in the early 1980s, Innes fell under the spell of figurative expressionism. Like many others he also left college with an enormous overdraft (which he didn't pay off until 1992) and worked in a bar to enable him to keep painting. He says the most crucial aspect of his early career was finding somewhere to work: "The day I left college, the most important thing was that I knew I had a studio to go to." The studio was actually just a garage, but it served its purpose.

However, it was the opportunity of a SAC residency in Amsterdam that enabled him to develop his artistic identity: "The residency afforded me time to develop work. It also allowed me to travel. Being in Aberdeen I could just manage London but it was hard to get anywhere else. Amsterdam gave me access to Europe and a contemporary art scene I'd never come across before."

By the start of the 1990s Innes was embarking on his characteristic work – his early series of Formed Paintings, with their emphasis on time, process and physicality: "My early work had been full of personal mythology, but I realised I was far too young for that sort of thing, I hadn't lived enough." He's not sure that his emerging success was linked to a particular historical moment but says that his work, like that of peers such as Ian Davenport and Fiona Rae, were "paintings which seemed to exist in their own right, that looked like the hand wasn't there".

Innes had a number of early supporters, like Andrew Nairne, now director of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. Inclusion in 1990s British Art Show enabled him to gain exposure, and when Jane Hamlyn at Frith Street Gallery took him on to her roster, he became one of the first of his piers in Scotland to be supported by a London gallery. He still works with Frith Street and in New York with gallerist Sean Kelly and over the years has had a number of important museum shows including the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and the Kunsthalle in Bern. He has recently published a book, Exposed Paintings, with the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.

If it all looks gloriously simple from this stage in his career, Innes is keen to emphasise that it was the support and interest of his artist colleagues, together with the public support available in Scotland that enabled him to develop as a younger artist. He says his current success can be attributed to focusing on his studio work: "If you're honest with yourself and keep working to develop your practice it will come round. Curators and other people around you will change. They'll want something one year and something different the next. The trick is to keep working through the lean times and the fluctuations."