By way of introduction, here is Edwin's painting of the Caley Station in Edinburgh, dated 1942. He includes architectural elements that are recognisable in contemporary photographs, as is the sunlight streaming in through the glass roof. And the strange red shape? That's his own silhouette, as if showing that this is his own very individual view of the scene.

During the early 1930s Edwin worked almost exclusively in watercolours, mainly painting outdoors, with a strong emphasis on local landscapes.

In the mid-1930s he became friends with a group of students at Edinburgh College of Art, including Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, who later became a prominent member of the St Ives group of modernist artists. Perhaps this contact with other artists encouraged a greater commitment to his own art. He joined the Scottish Society of Artists and attended life drawing evening classes (he was otherwise self-taught).

He started experimenting with oil paints, but his principal medium was still watercolour. His style became a bit more adventurous, with this painting from 1938 being a good example.

In the Summer of 1939 Edwin started subletting Barns-Graham's studio in Edinburgh, when she moved to St Ives. This was the first time he had a dedicated space to paint in and it led to dramatic changes in his artistic practice. He started working mainly in oils and his style and subject matter embraced Surrealism.

This is his second Surrealist painting, created during his first month in the studio. It's tempting to think there's a connection with René Magritte's work, but Edwin has made this his own. I've not seen upside-down ice cream cones in any of Magritte's pictures!

This was painted in October 1939, just a couple of months after Edwin started painting in a Surrealist style. Much of his work in this period was related to dreams and/or psychoanalysis and this may be a dreamscape. It's unique in the way he combines local landscape (the Pentland Hills) with surreal imagery such as the shepherd with wonky legs, his dog, and the ghostly cows. Not to mention the strange, green, worm-like object in the foreground!

Figures and plant forms (Spring growth?) inter-mingle in this work, dated May 1940. I assume the bed at bottom right is a strong hint that it's a dreamscape.

The title of this work, and the figure reclining in the foreground (maybe on an analyst's couch?), suggest a connection with psychoanalysis. The Surrealists were fascinated by Sigmund Freud's work, and I remember my father discussing Freud several times.

Unfortunately I never discussed this painting with him, but there's evidence to suggest he regarded it as the end of what he later referred to as his "brief flirtation with Surrealism":

• His very first Surrealist work, painted in August 1939, was titled Diagnosis 1, and this is Final Diagnosis.
• It's almost certainly the work he exhibited in 1951 entitled A Farewell to Surrealism and dated 1940.
• Perhaps the term The Schism in the title refers to a parting of the ways.

The immediate post-war years were a very creative and prolific time for Edwin. He regarded himself primarily as a serious painter, who had a day job to fund his art. This gave him freedom to follow his own path, rather than being forced to conform to the conservative tastes of the Scottish art market at the time.

For him (in his own words) "the purpose of art was the enlargement of experience and, in painting, that meant continual innovation and the refusal to create a personal style by self repetition". This led him to produce unorthodox, experimental work, much of which is unlike anything his contemporaries were doing. The diversity in this curation is representative of the diversity of the entire output of his mature career.

Earlier in his career, Edwin regularly exhibited at the open exhibitions held by the Society of Scottish Artists (SSA) and sometimes the Royal Scottish Academy, but by the mid-1940s they were accepting only his landscape works. He complained later that "these bodies consistently rejected anything that he regarded as original work". He terminated his membership of the SSA in 1948, probably in frustration.

This work came later, in 1949. It's inspired by a family day out. The figure on the left with the big blue eye is Edwin himself and the figure on the right is Edwin's father. In the middle is probably Edwin's mother, the 3 dots being buttons on her blouse. Of course you'll all be able to spot the dog!

Avant-garde works were the main focus of Edwin's mature career, but he continued to paint local landscapes too. These were almost always highly coloured, but otherwise each one was unique. Even when he painted the same scene several times, as he did with this view of the Pentland Hills, he varied the style dramatically.

In 1950 Edwin organised a solo exhibition in Edinburgh. He exhibited 73 oils and 21 watercolours, produced between 1936 and 1950. There was some press coverage. The Evening Dispatch twice printed captioned photographs. The Scotsman printed a review that praised his draughtsmanship but found much of the work "individual in the wrong way".

The following year he held another exhibition, of New Paintings. There were 58 works, all oils, 23 of which were newly painted, others painted a few years earlier but not exhibited before, and a few that appeared the previous year. This took place during the Edinburgh Festival and received very little attention, probably eclipsed by all the other events in the Festival.

Edwin married in 1952. He later said he had no intention of giving up painting, but found it to be unviable in the atmosphere of domestic and family responsibilities. He put away his brushes and didn't pick them up again for nearly 30 years, after my brother and I had left home.

He painted several fascinating works in the 1980s, some with connections to previous works, but his approach remained as versatile and individual as before. He hoped to achieve more recognition, but was thwarted by failing eyesight.

The last act of his artistic career was to gift this painting to Edinburgh's City Art Centre. He drafted some notes to accompany the work. They finished with the words "He thought of himself as a purely individual painter".