"The Scotsman" - December 2002

Gerard M Burns has got the painters in. "Real painters," he says, laughing. Blokes in spattered overalls who have got his living room covered with dust sheets. He was too busy to do it himself. Too busy painting. He is preparing for his first solo show in London, in the Air Gallery on Dover Street. His studio - a cross between a summer house and a large shed at the back of his Cumbernauld home - has huge figurative canvases in various stages of completion on every wall.

He makes me a big cup of tea and cuts me a chunk of his 14-year-old son's birthday cake, apologising for his lack of artistic pretension. "I have a wife, three kids and I work a nine to five," he smiles. "I think the PR company would have liked someone a bit more eccentric."

In fact, the musician-turned-teacher-turned artist prefers to let his work speak for itself. His large canvases transform ordinary scenes into mythic dramas - a little girl leads a bull, immense yet submissive to her self-assurance; the Stations of the Cross take place on the streets of Glasgow; a young boy crouches at the head of a pack of wolves; a group of children carry a Saltire.

His style is closer to photorealism than conceptualism, hardly the fashion in contemporary art, which might explain why he has received little attention from critics or commercial galleries. But for the public, it's a different story. Showing in Glasgow's Groucho St Judes, his paintings have caught the eye of Ridley Scott's film-maker son Jake, and of Ewan MacGregor, who is currently discussing a commission. "That gives me street cred with my sons," he laughs.

The PR company promoting the Air Gallery show hasn't bothered with modesty. The publicity is provocative to say the least. The invitation to the opening came complete with a piece of Blu-tac in a plastic bag, a "Do-it-yourself modern art kit ... Turner Prize guaranteed ... Let the acclaim and the celebrity begin". "Alternatively, if you want to see real art with integrity, sincerity and ability you are invited . . . "

"Yeah, I'm slightly uncomfortable about it," says Burns. "I hate mud-slinging and artists are really bad at it. It's meant to be tongue-in-cheek. But there is a gulf between the way I work and the broad spectrum of contemporary art. You have to draw a line and say either: 'I don't understand,' or dare to say: 'I'm not impressed.' I'm not entirely comfortable that they used the word 'integrity' about my work, but increasingly when I look at contemporary art, that is what I'm concerned about: is this person taking the piss? I feel bad about that but I'm left with no alternative. People are fed up with being made to feel that they don't understand art. A lot of contemporary art alienates people. I want to make work people can relate to."

I ask Burns which artist he most admires. He goes to the bookshelf. Velasquez. "I can't get past him. That's where I want to be." He points out how the most casual of brushstrokes are transformed into utter clarity. "That's what really gets me up in the mornings. Every time I think I'm getting good, I have a wee browse through this and realise I've still got a bit to go. My goal is realism, but it's by increasingly abstract means that realism is attained."

Burns has painted for as long as he can remember. "If you'd asked me when I was nine if this is what I wanted to do, I would have said 'yes'. But it wasn't real. It was about as realistic as someone saying they wanted to be a pop star or a fireman." He did a year of civil engineering at university and hated it before switching to Glasgow School of Art. That wasn't easy either. "I've always been by instinct a figurative painter. It was so totally and utterly out of fashion.

"By the time I got to fourth year, I gave them what they wanted, I worked in sand, massive abstract pieces, I thoroughly enjoyed doing it, but there was no challenge. I found it was impossible to tell if a piece was good or bad, finished or not finished. It imploded in the end. I remember starting to rime this big oatmeal canvas, putting this nice big white stroke on it and thinking: 'that's it finished,' then thinking: 'there's got to be something wrong here, I've effectively ruled myself out of the equation.'"

He left art school so disillusioned that for the first time in his life he stopped painting. He turned to his second love, music. His band, Valerie and the Week of Wonders, was signed to A&M Records and went on to support the likes of Love & Money and Simple Minds.

"It was a great band, we enjoyed it, but I knew it wasn't for me. The music business eats people, chews them up and spits them out." After about four years, he left the bright lights for teacher training college. It was in the classroom that his love of painting was rekindled. "Physically coming in contact with the medium again, even if it was simply showing kids how to hold a brush, that started the chemical thing going again, I realised how much I'd missed it."

That was when he started to paint those big mythic ideas, with a little bit of help from the staff room. "Schools are amazing places. You meet some of the most gifted, incredible people who are 'just teachers'. Get talking in a staff room and before you know where you are you've got a classical scholar, someone who's brilliantly well read, someone who throws pieces by Beethoven at you, and all just over a cup of coffee. I found my head just bursting with all these things."

After teaching for ten years, he quit teaching to paint full time. Concerned that he had to support the family through his art, he produced some "obviously saleable" watercolours of Glasgow. They didn't sell. "It takes a wee while for the penny to drop with me. If I make paintings I think are going to sell, they don't sell. I don't like them. Other people don't like them. The pieces that I make my living from are pieces that I value. It's about having the courage to let go of yet another security blanket and saying: 'this is what I'm going to do - paint 8ft by 7ft paintings of bulls being led by little girls.' How daft is that?"

He works principally from photos. His models are family, friends and neighbours. All his sons appear. "Particularly Patrick at the moment (the boy with the wolves) - he's eight, nearly nine, just that age when everybody remembers being a child. I could paint him forever and he's brilliantly blasé about it." He says 11-year old Ryan and Matthew, 14, are "a bit huffed that they're not in so many at the moment".

He's not chasing recognition, though he thinks it will come. "Not in the next three months," he says, "but in the next 10 years." For the moment, he's happy to work his day in the studio at the bottom of the garden. "That's the problem with having been a teacher all your life, the bell still rings in your head. I start at nine, have coffee at 11, lunch at one, coffee at three. Now and again, something magic will happen. But a huge amount of the time, it's just graft. Like these guys," he says, jabbing a thumb towards the men in overalls who are slowly but surely changing the colour of the living room.

· New Work by Gerard M Burns is at the Air Gallery, Dover Street, 16 - 20 December, or visit www.gerardmburns.com