Arts interview: Toby Paterson

It promises to be a big year for Paterson. The Fruitmarket show is a major showcase and a clearing of the decks of sorts. At 35, the Beck's Futures winner has a substantial body of work behind him. As well as new pieces there will be a strong retrospective element and a substantial book.

In the summer his work as lead artist for the Docklands Light Railway extension will be launched, when a raft of new and refurbished stations are opened in East London. As an artist who has consistently explored architecture and urban space, he will now have a small signature on a chunk of Olympic infrastructure.

And after a few years hurtling about the cities of Europe experiencing everything from the Warsaw cityscape to the inside of a Greek police station, (he was taking research photos at the ruined Athens airport, honest!) Paterson hopes to spend much more time in Glasgow and in the studio this year.

He trained in painting at Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1995, and while he has worked in painting, constructions, relief and public sculpture – a major work, Posed Array is outside the BBC's Pacific Quay HQ – he now recognises that he is increasingly interested in the qualities of paint. In 2010 he will be coming home in more ways than one.

Back in 2002 when he won Beck's Futures, the headlines ran "Skateboarder Wins Art Prize", as though he wasn't an artist at all. These days he's quite relaxed about the different facets of his art. "I've never felt that building a sculptural skate park, as I once did for a weekend at Glasgow's Arches, was that divorced from, say, making paintings on perspex, but now there's much more of a free flow."

Where skateboarding did help define him was in his exploration of the undiscovered texture of the city streets. It was via the underpasses, ramps and steps of concrete landscapes such as Glasgow's Anderston Centre or London's Barbican, that he first became fascinated by the melancholy of the urban landscape.

Though he grew up in a leafy Victorian street in Glasgow's West End, he was always aware of the oddness of his home city's collision of architectural styles. Neither the concrete monoliths nor the sandstone curves were quite of his time.

His exhibitions have been built on painstaking research into the urban environment of the cities he works in, from Chicago to Glasgow. His paintings are sometimes clear representations of keynote structures or more complex responses to the fragmentary glimpses of overlooked spaces. More recently they are increasingly abstract, taking his experience of the world and transforming into it something clean-edged yet melancholy.

Sometimes his art has been interpreted as an admiration of concrete brutalism, but his intention is more analytical, a kind of sifting of post-war architectural experience from classic European modernism to its home-grown variety in the work of Denys Lasdun or Glasgow's Gillespie, Kidd and Coia.

In a recent set of projects he visited some of the more brutal outposts of European change: cities like Dresden or Warsaw, rebuilt from utter destruction. He's clear that in his home town much post-war development simply didn't work. "My absolute bte noire about cities is the lurching from one polar position to another. It's a pretty washy-washy liberal point of view I have, but it's simply, why can't we get a grip on this, when there are plenty of other places that can?"

Paterson's hope has brought this knowledge to bear on his schemes for the DLR, creating a visual consistency for new and refurbished stations, which have already been designed by architects. "It's about slotting things into existing spaces and structures… secret little kernels of information."

He wasn't without qualms when he took up the commission, aware of the issues of gentrification and property development that can plague this kind of urban transformation.

"You are aware that what you're doing is seen as greasing the wheels of these parts of the world being irrevocably changed. I've not been coy about my nervousness about the Olympics, but on the other hand I'm a great believer in decent public transport and the DLR really is great. It will make bits of London more liveable but it will also open them up to economic speculation."

Art is in Paterson's family. His grandfather, the artist Lennox Paterson, was once deputy director of Glasgow School of Art; his father, who has never worked in the arts but who is, "incredibly enthusiastic, very astute", became chairman of the board of governors, "thankfully after I left".

He doesn't feel it was inevitable that he became an artist – "I didn't have a clue what I was doing". His studies at Glasgow were not all happy. "I was 17, far too young, it worked out fine in the end, though."

Paterson felt a bit adrift in a painting department, then still in the thrall of the expressionist Eighties, a period of art for which he felt no affinity. "It said nothing to me about my life, I found it deeply patronising. I was influenced by design, the whole skateboard thing, the clean-edged California thing, the way that bands like Teenage Fanclub all looked to the west. It had an escapist edge."

These days the artist describes his education as "doing things backwards".

But sitting with him in his Glasgow studio I wonder whether in fact the dynamic is more circular. He's back in the studio, back thinking about painting, and this month we'll get to see a lot of work that has only been shown abroad. 2010 promises to be Toby Paterson's own special year of Homecoming. v

Toby Paterson is at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 30 January until 28 March 28 www.fruitmarket.co.uk

This article first appeared in Scotland on Sunday on 3 January, 2010