William Johnstone

William Johnstone OBE (1897–1981) was a Scottish artist and writer, and Principal of Central School of Arts and Crafts from 1947 to 1960. Life Johnstone was born in 1897 in Denholm in the Scottish Borders and grew up to a farming family. After the First World War he gave up the life of a farmer to go to Edinburgh College of Art. Here he met the poet Hugh MacDiarmid who shared many of his political and artistic ideals. Together they formed the concept of the Scottish Renaissance to release the nation from its cultural poverty under a centralised British arts scene. Johnstone travelled to Paris in his youth, which opened him to the ideas of modernism. He also spent time in the US, where he became interested in Native American cave paintings for their deemed naïve simplicity.