Scottish contemporary artists

Stuart Fergusson Victor Sutcliffe (23 June 1940 – 10 April 1962), known as Stu Sutcliffe, was a Scottish painter and musician better known as the original bass guitarist of the English rock band the Beatles. Sutcliffe left the band to pursue his career as a painter, having previously attended the Liverpool College of Art. Sutcliffe and John Lennon are credited with inventing the name "Beetles", as they both liked Buddy Holly's band, the Crickets. John then came up with "The Beatles", from the word beat (though John's original spelling of the pun was "Beatals"). As a member of the group when it was a five-piece band, Sutcliffe is one of several people sometimes referred to as the "Fifth Beatle".

John Patrick Byrne (6 January 1940 – 30 November 2023) was a Scottish playwright and designer. He wrote The Slab Boys Trilogy, plays which explore working-class life in Scotland, and the TV dramas Tutti Frutti and Your Cheatin' Heart. Byrne was also a painter, printmaker and theatre designer.

Anya Gallaccio (born 1963) is a British artist, who creates site-specific, minimalist installations and often works with organic matter (including chocolate, sugar, flowers and ice).

Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi CBE RA (, 7 March 1924 – 22 April 2005) was a Scottish sculptor and artist. He is widely considered to be one of the pioneers of pop art.

James "Jimmy" Boyle (born 17 May 1944) is a Scottish former gangster and convicted murderer who became a sculptor and novelist after his release from prison.

Alison Watt OBE FRSE RSA (born 1965) is a Scottish painter who first came to national attention while still at college when she won the 1987 Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Alasdair James Gray (28 December 1934 – 29 December 2019) was a Scottish writer and artist. His first novel, Lanark (1981), is seen as a landmark of Scottish fiction. He published novels, short stories, plays, poetry and translations, and wrote on politics and the history of English and Scots literature. His works of fiction combine realism, fantasy, and science fiction with the use of his own typography and illustrations, and won several awards.

Jack Vettriano (born Jack Hoggan, 17 November 1951 – 1 March 2025) was a Scottish painter, known for his distinctive figurative style, often depicting scenes of romance, mystery, and nostalgia. Largely self-taught, Vettriano gained international recognition with his 1992 painting The Singing Butler which became one of the best-selling art prints in the UK.

Robert Montgomery (born c. 1972) is a Scottish-born, London-based poet, artist and sculptor known for his site-specific installations created from light and text, as well as his 'fire poems'. Montgomery works in a "melancholic post-Situationist" tradition, primarily in public spaces. He is regarded as a leading figure in the conceptual art world.

Charles Avery (born 1973) is a Scottish artist from Oban. He currently lives and works in London. Since 2004 he has devoted his practice to the perpetual description of an imaginary island. Through drawings, sculptures and texts. Avery describes the topology, cosmology and inhabitants of this fictional territory, from the market of the main town Onomatopoeia to the Eternal Forest where an unknown beast called the Noumenon is held to reside. The project can be read as a meditation on some of the central themes of philosophy of art-making, and on the colonization and ownership of the world of ideas.