Ian Hamilton Finlay died earlier this year, leaving behind him a legacy which challenges all those concerned with the role of Scotland within the international art world. And indeed, anyone concerned with the multifarious ways in which the roles of the 20th and 21st century artist is reduced by the ever-expanding power of market forces – which makes art into a commodity or form of entertainment.

The art of Ian Hamilton Finlay cannot be confined by the rules which govern the 21st century art world. His art placed him firmly within the history of ideas. His name and his life’s work is now firmly associated with his Gesamtkunstwerk which is to be experienced in and around a farm aptly named Stonypath. To reach it you must walk up a rocky path on a steep windswept Lanarkshire hillside, near the village of Dunsyre. It was renamed Little Sparta by Ian Hamilton Finlay to indicate that it stood apart from Edinburgh as Scotland’s capital city.

Edinburgh with some justification is regarded as ‘The Modern Athens’. As such it is identified by its glory days, long since gone, in the age of The Scottish Enlightenment. Ian Hamilton Finlay seriously questioned this image of Edinburgh. He did not believe that it had lived up to the 18th century spirit of the Enlightenment. Finlay chose to challenge Edinburgh’s proud claim to have emulated Athens by identifying his home and place of work with the fighting spirit of Sparta. He felt it necessary to do this when he had transformed Stonypath into what he regarded as a philosophers’ garden – which could express his firm conviction that his garden was not a ‘retreat’ but an ‘attack’.

He was inspired to achieve this in collaboration with his second wife, Sue Macdonald Lockhart. I first met her in the company of my friend Pete McGinn in a cafe in Edinburgh’s Forrest Road – in the early days of the Traverse Theatre and the Paperback Bookshop of Jim Haynes.

I knew Pete McGinn as a fellow student at Edinburgh College of Art and as an artist associated with Ian Hamilton Finlay’s esoteric publishing house known as the Wild Hawthorn Press. This was the press that published Poor Old Tired Horse. It provided me with my first experience of concrete poetry and the world of Ian Hamilton Finlay, and therefore the world of Black Mountain College and such poets as Jonathon Williams, Robert Creely and the Cistercian monk, Dom Sylvester Houedard.

Ian Hamilton Finlay had founded the Wild Hawthorn Press in collaboration with his friend Jessie McGuffie in 1961. They invited Pete McGinn to design and illustrate a slim book with the unforgettable title: Glasgow Beasts an’ a Bird (Haw, an’ Inseks an’ Aw, a Fush’). This was concrete poetry with an undeniable Scottish dimension, and vintage Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Sue Macdonald Lockhart helped me present the Traverse Theatre Gallery exhibition in a Bank of Scotland building in George Street for the 1964 Edinburgh Festival, soon after she met Ian Hamilton Finlay. Not long after this meeting, they decided to spend their married life together on one of her family’s farms, remote from the urban life and thirty-eight miles distant from Edinburgh. Until their separation in the late 80s, she devoted herself to bringing up their two children, Alec and Ailie, and co-creating the garden around the run-down complex of farm buildings. Neither she nor her husband had any qualifications as gardeners.

As the years passed, she acted as a most efficient representative of her husband as an artist who was suffering from agoraphobia. Thus she found herself travelling in the international art world, dealing with the complexities of exhibitions and commissions. These slowly but surely established the name of Ian Hamilton Finlay far beyond Scotland – as a leading exponent of a new and thought-provoking expression of avant-garde art, binding together the literary and the visual arts. As director of the Demarco Gallery, I gave Ian Hamilton Finlay a one man show in 1969 and in so doing introduced him to the Maltese artists, Richard England and John Borg Manduca. In collaboration with them, Ian produced concrete poetry honouring Malta’s heroic role in the Second World War.

I realised that Stonypath was a ‘nodal’ point on the expeditions I devised in collaboration with Edinburgh University’s Schools of Scottish and Extra-Mural Studies. These expeditions were under the aegis of The Demarco Gallery’s experimental Summer School, inspired by Black Mountain College. They explored all aspects of Scotland’s cultural life in relation to Europe. I chose to entitle this school Edinburgh Arts because it was centered on The Demarco Gallery during the period of the Edinburgh Festival, and how, through the Festival, Scotland could play a significant role in the international art world.

The expeditions began in the Mediterranean, linking Scotland to the culture of ancient Rome and Greece, focusing on Malta, Italy, France, Greece and the former Yugoslavia. At Stonypath, Edinburgh Arts faculty and its students found themselves in a world where Apollo could be seen at home, far from Delphi. It was the legendary land of the hyperborean, beyond that of the North wind, where they could see a farm building transformed into a temple dedicated to Apollo, His Missiles, His Muses and His Music, These expeditions took place over many years, beginning in 1972, when Stonypath possessed only one large tree. On its trunk was affixed a plaque with the words Mare Nostrum, because the sound of the wind in its branches was like the sound of the sea and because Ian Hamilton Finlay derived a great deal of his inspiration from his love of maritime life, particularly that of Scottish fishermen.

My memories of Stonypath were focused on the maritime images which attracted my attention and, in particular, a small lake which Ian and Sue had constructed in honour of their son Eck. I therefore remembered him as a tiny child dressed in a sailor’s suit, sailing on ‘Lochan Eck’ in a small boat, which Ian had made specially for him. Lochan Eck was Ian’s inland seascape.

He and I met because of our shared love of Scottish fishing boats and their harbours. He had admired a lithograph I had made as a student of fishing boats berthed at low tide in Musselburgh’s Fisherrow Harbour, and a handmade book I wrote, designed and published on the history of Scottish fishing boats in my final year at Edinburgh College of Art.

It now seems inevitable that he invited me to collaborate with him to make screenprints such as The Little Seamstress which depicts a small sailing boat on a straight course across a calm sea. It is clearly drawing a line on the surface of the sea in the form of its wake reminiscent of the handiwork of a seamstress. Perhaps my personal favourite is A Calm in a Teacup, in which Ian commissioned me to make a small watercolour in the style of Kate Greenaway, depicting a sailing ship becalmed on the surface of a full cup of tea.

It was fitting that in the last decade of his life he was invited by his good friend, Joyce Laing, to be a guest artist of the now well established visual arts festival, centred on the harbour of the Fifeshire fishing village of Pittenweem. This was the same year when he was honoured with an exhibition presented by the Tate in their gallery overlooking the harbour of St Ives. In an interview for Radio Scotland, he confessed to me that he preferred Pittenweem to St. Ives as a place he identified with his love of all things to do with the life and work of fishermen.

The lengthy list of artists with whom he collaborated is a testament to his interest in and respect for not only the skills of painters and sculptors, but also of printmakers, illustrators, typographers, calligraphers, photographers, book binders and designers.

Among the very first of these collaborators was Margot Sandeman. They first met as fellow students at Glasgow School of Art in 1940. They enjoyed a long lasting working friendship from the days when she was invited to illustrate editions of Poor Old Tired Horse, and decades later to make three suites of still life oil paintings inspired by the significance of 11 words, defining the aspects of the vegetable world: ‘Olive, red currant berry, honey, pear and nut’ and with things man made: ‘Net, patch, sheaf jug and twine’.

Ian and Sue Hamilton Finlay fought long and hard to defend the truth and beauty of Little Sparta, against the worst aspects of bureaucracy and an art world ill-prepared to accept the challenge inherent in their dedication to their self-imposed task. Ian, in the last years of his life, made sure that Little Sparta, his undoubted masterpiece, would be able to flourish beyond his lifetime.

The spirit of Little Sparta was honoured by the Italian collector, Giulliano Gori, as a direct result of the visit to Little Sparta that I arranged for him in 1982. Arguably the largest and most important collection of site-specific sculpture is to be found amidst the Tuscan hillside vineyards and olive groves of La Fattoria di Celle. This is quintessential Italian farmscape overlooking the historic hills of Vinci, twenty miles from Florence. There, in an idyllic section of an olive grove, can be found, to my mind, a small-scale version of Little Sparta. It is Ian Hamilton Finlay’s contribution to a collection of masterworks by the likes of Richard Serra, Robert Morris, Dani Karavan, Sol le Witt and Dennis Oppenheim. In such august company, Ian Hamilton Finlay found himself ‘at home’.

It is now the responsibility of a board of trustees, under the chairmanship of Magnus Linklater, the former chair of the Scottish Arts Council. He and his fellow trustees have been left a great challenge along with Pia Simig, who will continue being responsible for safeguarding all other aspects of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work, including those works still to be complete. They have to deal with an incomparable legacy in the history of modern art. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s physical presence at Little Sparta will be sorely missed. The essential challenge will be how to make his absence positive.