From the Archive: Steven Campbell the lost Glasgow Boy

Well, it's certainly on mine. And it's not just because 24 hours ago I had a chance to look at the paintings that make up Campbell's latest exhibition. Walk into the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh for The Caravan Club, his first one-man show in Scotland for the best part of a decade, and you are immediately pitched into Campbellworld, the unique landscape that the artist has explored since he first came to prominence in the early eighties. It's a world where boys climb trees while nude corpses wait to be discovered in the undergrowth below, where disembodied hands float ominously in mid-air, where the prevailing mood is anxiety and horror, and where death is never far away. Think Just William reimagined by David Lynch and you're halfway there. The result is both fascinating and compelling, perhaps the darkest, densest work he's done yet.

''It is just old-fashioned art about your emotions, your feelings, your vulnerability,'' says Campbell of this, his return to the limelight after years in the relative dark. ''I hadn't painted for a while until doing these and when I started painting again I found it was my natural home.''

If anything, his latest work, he says, is more autobiographical than previous paintings. Or the incidents depicted are at any rate. You draw on your worst memories, he says. ''Or I do.''

Like his memory of the Saturday afternoon in the New York subway back in the eighties when someone was pushed off the platform. While his fellow passengers rushed across to the other platform to get a better look Campbell stayed where he was. ''They were all over there trying to see this and I thought 'f*** this, I'm going home'. So I just stood over to this side of the platform and as I was doing that they brought him (the victim) down on a stretcher, uncovered, with the stumps all whacking. Then I looked at the ground and there was a rat with a donut bag stuck on his head.''

Which seems grimly appropriate. It is, as he says, an image that would tend to stick in your mind. The subway victim, the rat and the donut bag all turn up on the walls of the Talbot Rice, memory finally transmuted into art. The question is why now? Why not 10 years ago? Campbell says he doesn't know.

Maybe it has something to do with Campbell's own recent brush with the grim reaper. In the weeks leading up to our conversation there was some doubt as to whether Campbell would be fit enough to talk to me at all. He's not been well, I was told. What was wrong with him, though, no one was saying. Campbell still isn't. ''I had a wee thing, yeah,'' he admits. ''It is private. Some of my other fellow artists have handled their medical problems publicly by telling people what's up with them and making a wee soap opera out of it.'' Perhaps his fellow Glasgow artist Peter Howson's well-publicised battle with the bottle may spring to mind at this point. ''That's not the kind of man that I am. I take on something that comes to me, look it in the face as a matter of fact. I don't yelp.''

Still, word has got around, suggestions of heavy duty illness. There's been gossip, I tell him. ''What, that I was dying? I don't know any gossip. I did some telly thing and I suppose I looked pretty bad. My mate Morty phoned me and said he was greeting because he thought I was dying. I said 'nah'.''

So what are you telling me? It wasn't that serious? ''Aye, it was pretty serious. It was just one of those things. Everyone gets hit with one thing, don't they? One time you're going to get battered, but I battered my way out of it more or less. So now I'm not battered. Unbattered. Still a bit battered around the face.'' As he says it, he pulls at at the skin under his eyes and beneath his cheekbones as if concerned that it no longer quite fits.

Was it alcohol-related, I ask. It's been said now and again that Campbell likes a drink. ''No it wasn't.'' That's as much as he'll say. To comment further, he argues, would be undignified.

A couple of days later I phone him again and ask him to reconsider, but he's sticking to his line. It's none of our business.

He is a bit of a contrary bugger is Campbell. A devoted family man who says he would like to be an outsider, someone who revelled in the delights of New York for part of the eighties, yet has always seemed more interested in the countryside in his work. One of the themes of The Caravan Club is, he says, restlessness. ''I don't feel very stable just now. I feel footloose. I've been like this for a while.'' Yet he's lived in Kippen for 12 years. ''When we moved here it was on the cusp of being arty. But this has become commuter distance and you never see anyone and no one's interested in art or being excited about anything.''

Why stay? ''God knows. Familiarity. You don't need much to survive. Four walls and a roof. And friends can be easily disposed of. Well, so I've found. It's not that hard to make them and it's not that hard to get rid of them. I've got a cycle of about five years, maybe four. I worked it out.''

Perhaps a more mundane reason for staying put is his children's schooling. Family matters to him. He's been married to Carol (a teacher) for 27 years, raised three children, Lauren, Greer and Rory. ''When you've got a family, if they've still got two arms and two legs and a head then it's been a success. Just count the digits.'' His oldest daughter is about to decamp to Dundee to study medicine. ''Love,'' he says sweetly, ''is constant.''

But that domestic world doesn't cross over into his work, at least not consciously. ''It's a small journey from the house to here but it is a journey,'' he says, one that takes him into a different place, one that's very much his own. ''People say to me start living in the real world. Why the f*** do I want to do that? I've got my own.''

Campbell looks older than his 49 years, but he's certainly in better shape than he appeared on his last public appearance at the Creative Scotland Awards a couple of years ago. While his face certainly looks drawn, cheekbones prominent, the artist is, as usual, the image of sartorial elegance. Ever the dandy, he is dressed up to the nines for my visit; striped trousers and jacket, the latter with a cherokee patch on the pocket, waistcoat complete with a pocket watch on a fob and Van Dyke beard neatly trimmed. He's a picture. I complement him on looking so Edwardian, but he says he was aiming for something 1960s. Whatever the style, he has always liked dressing up. When he first went to Glasgow School of Art in 1978, he even started wearing a beret and cord trousers - the archetypal artist's uniform. Later, he'd go into Oxfam on a Monday and buy a suit, wear it all week. Paint in it, go out in it, socialise in it and then throw it away and get another one, start the process again.

If anything, he was more likely to grow up to be a footballer than an artist. A council estate kid, as a teenager he played in goal for his country at under-18s level and wore the No 1 shirt for Bellahouston Juniors. He modelled himself on the legendary Russian keeper Lev Yashin.

But a future in the game was never an ambition. He felt self-conscious, a sensitive teenager surrounded by a pack of ex-professionals. His interest ended, he says, when he made a save by pushing the ball against the bar only for it to come back off the woodwork, smack the back of his head and drop into the net. ''Lev Yashin would never have done that.''

It was that loss of face that's the key. Campbell always did like the pose. It was the idea of being an artist rather than any idea of making art that originally drew him towards Glasgow School of Art. Some idea of romantic dissolution was gained while sitting in the cabin of the crane in the steelworks, whiling away the night shift reading existentialist literature (he had left Rutherglen Academy at 16 and followed his father into the steelworks for nearly six years).

That notion was enough for him to take night classes, scrape a C in Higher Art and squeeze into art school where he soon realised he had a talent. In that he was not alone. He and his contemporaries Adrian Wiszniewski, Ken Currie and Peter Howson quickly became officially ''hot'', bagged and tagged as a hip new cultural phenomenon, the Glasgow Boys (or the New Glasgow Boys if you had any sense of art history). They were never a gang. They weren't even all friends. But they represented something new, something fresh. Before they all arrived at the turn of the eighties students had gone to art school to learn how to teach, Campbell says, but it soon became obvious that Campbell and his classmates were better than the teachers and were soon left to their own devices.

Campbell quickly worked his impeccable working-class credentials to win a Fulbright Scholarship, an exhibition in New York and an entree to the city's artistic demi-monde. He stayed in New York for four years, painting and partying. Carol got a job with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and Campbell swanned around in his fine threads while his canvases wore five-figure price tags.

As the eighties began to peter out, though, so did the appeal of the Big Apple. He returned to Scotland and the life of a reclusive country gentleman and messed around with mixed media work. The art world had moved on, anyway. The wilful shock of the new that was the calling card of the Sensation generation - Hirst, Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, all those media-friendly controversialists - had little time for the old-fashioned craft of the painter. In his new book The Nineties: When Surface was Depth, cultural historian Michael Bracewell ruefully labels Campbell and his former fellow traveller Adrian Wiszniewski as Brit arts's lost boys. Three years ago Wiszniewski himself was moved to declare that painting was dead. But Campbell is not ready to attend its funeral just yet. ''He never knew it was alive anyway, I don't think, '' he says of Wiszniewski. ''It can't be dead for me if it's my world. I can do anything inside this world. I can make anything real or unreal.''

The truth is Campbell's paintings have never stopped selling. He's always had an audience, even when the critics were more interested in sharks in formaldehyde. Not that market value is the reason he paints. ''I think my paintings make up for a lack in me, make up for a space or something. It's very close. It's hardly art anymore. I wouldn't call it art. It's so intuitive I could probably do it blind.''

Campbell once spent a year on the psychiatrist's couch, he says. It wasn't helpful. ''He was hopeless,'' says Campbell of his would-be analyst. ''He had a red Renoir on the wall and Renoir doesn't use red in his paintings.'' The truth is I'm not sure Campbell really wants solutions. He likes the mystery too much. According to Who's Who his interests include detective novels, but he admits the plot resolutions are often a disppointment. And, as mysteries go, there is none greater than the Big D itself. Despite his recent experiences he says he is still attracted to that almost adolescent desire to romanticise death. ''It's actually an event I always wanted to have happen - just to see what it was like. You know all these great artists died young and I was always interested in that aspect of it.'' Something of the adolescent remains in this 49-year-old.

Actually, the experience proved something of a disappointment. ''I don't think it made you understand anything any different,'' he says ''I thought it might.'' He's now come to the conclusion that we're all beyond learning. ''If you consider the age of man you have a measly number of years and it's not going to make any difference to your core wisdom. You'll still be running in fear.'' The thing is he doesn't sound too fearful. ''I really believe in the now. The time we are living because I don't know anything else but that. Possibly that's why death is so romantic. I don't think I'm going to die.''

The photographer has arrived and we emerge blinking from Campbell's womb of a studio. Later he'll return to preparing for the opening of his exhibition. Beyond that he doesn't know what he's going to do yet. That's the way he likes it.