A medieval Highland castle and foundry of pop artist Gerald Laing, kept alive by his son

When the Scotland-based artist and sculptor Gerald Laing died in November 2011 and a newspaper journalist came knocking on the door of his son Farquhar Ogilvie-Laing, Farquhar summed up his father with the following words: ‘He painted and sculpted, rebuilt motorcycles and cars and castles, and wrote books. But his biggest talent of all was he was a fantastic father.’

This touching relationship between father and son remains central to Farquhar, himself a father of three, and now, as founder and director of the Black Isle Bronze foundry, one of Europe’s foremost bronze casters. It is also palpable at Kinkell Castle on the banks of the River Conon in Inverness-shire, where Farquhar and his wife Jill – whom he met in a bar appropriately enough called The Foundry – live with their children, Madeleine, 12, Fergus, 10, and Jemima, 7.

The story begins with John Osborne’s era-defining play Look Back in Anger and its staging at the Royal Court Theatre in 1957. At the time, Gerald was a subaltern in the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, having followed his father into the army and his regiment. But he was clearly not standard army material, and when he saw Osborne’s play as a member of that angry post-war generation, he found himself forced to reflect. ‘It was a turning point in my life,’ Gerald later wrote. Realising he was a rebel and as such ill-suited to a military existence, at 24, he resigned his commission and enrolled at what was then Saint Martin’s School of Art in London. Gerald went on to become a leading light in the Pop art movement of the Sixties. Today, he is spoken of in the same regard as American artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol, and Brits Peter Blake, Allen Jones and David Hockney.

While his paintings are probably his best-known works, the sculpture was one of Gerald’s regular mediums and it was an interest in this that was the first major legacy he passed on to Farquhar. As a child, Farquhar had helped his father in a small foundry at home. ‘I knew from the age of five or so that I wanted my work to be here,’ says Farquhar. The ‘here’ he refers to is Kinkell Castle, the second part of his father’s legacy.

The elder son from Gerald’s second marriage, Farquhar went from Gordonstoun School in Moray to a history of art course at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. Work at an auction house followed, but it was when he started as an apprentice at the Morris Singer Art Foundry in Hampshire – where works of art have been cast in bronze since 1848 – that the young Scot rediscovered the métier introduced to him by his father.

Although brought up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Gerald’s antecedents were Scottish, and from life as an artist in a New York garret, he decided he wanted a summer refuge. Europe beckoned, then Scotland and with Farquhar’s mother Galina, Gerald toured the Highlands in search of some medieval base to call their own. In 1968, they found Kinkell Castle, a Z-plan stronghold that was the former seat of the clan Mackenzie, ruinous and in the hands of local farmer Angus MacDonald. Gerald paid £5,000 for it and spent the remainder of his life nurturing it into a family home, studio and workshop. While the property’s fortified origins are evident in its gunholes, peepholes and turrets, Kinkell Castle is as contemporary today as it is historic. Inside, old walls sport dot paintings of Brigitte Bardot and Amy Winehouse; outside, the relative symmetry of lawns is broken up by a sculpted torso, a nude and a modernist pyramid.