I have an eyrie in Glasgow. I'm on the top floor of one of the old tenements with a view of the chimney tops. When I was a kid, I lived up the road, and this street had a reputation for drug dealers and prostitutes. Now the whole street's full of thespians and designers and religious communes, so perhaps not that much has changed.  Two doors up to the right is the Society for Transcendental Meditation; window frames and door and van parked outside, all painted a matching shade of sunshine yellow. Two doors up to the left, is the house where the Scottish colourist, John Duncan Fergusson, used to live. The living room still contains a wall-length mirror where Fergusson's dark-eyed wife, the dancer Margaret Morris, practised making pirouettes against the background of the black marble fireplace.  Their drawing room has so many windows that the room is freezing in winter, but is blessed with a prospect over the park to the university. Fergusson painted the view, letting the image from his windows live long after he had abandoned the house. It was started during the Blitz, and a shard of glass from his Clouston Street studio windows split the canvas. He repaired it and gave the work to Glasgow University. Now it hangs in the Hunterian art gallery.  Spring in Glasgow has a buxom Flora with pencilled eyebrows and Max Factor lips standing in front of a panorama of Glasgow's west end, akin to a cool-coloured Nice. Patched and truncated above a network of trees, there is the dome of Kibble Palace: a Byzantine bosom; a hill - Hillhead? Dowanhill? - (although both are impossible to see from Clouston Street) bedecked with a lonely pillar, like a sentinel outside the city; and there is the university spire standing erect, splitting the sky in two beside Flora's head as she cocks us a blank gaze.  The sky of Fergusson's Spring in Glasgow is recognisably that of evening light after rain. Flesh-flushed clouds hold back heaven promising to burst again. These are not the dilettante fumes of the south of France. These clouds are used to washing streets, to blasting the pigeon shit from your window ledge.  If you go straight on past the mini-roundabout at the end of Clouston Street, the road goes over the bridge and turns into Kirklee. Kirklee had its quotient of artists and writers, too. "The Studio" marks the house where Benno Schotz, the sculptor, lived. I have a faint memory, if not an outright fantasy, of going to visit him when I was a child. I remember a dark room with windows overlooking trees. In the shadows were figures on plinths, and half-finished on turntables, all of them globular and alive. And Schotz himself, all fingers and a shock of hair, though this might be my own made-up legend rather than fact.  Mrs Kay, who used to clean our house when I was young, cleaned Schotz's, too. Mrs Kay was the inspiration for the angel that gazes down at the congregation with furious love above the altar at St Charles's church, up the road. Schotz's terracotta sculptures, representing Christ's journey to the cross, line every wall of Coia's simple church.  Schotz's sculptures are elsewhere in Glasgow. But my favourite is in a quiet patch a step away from an abandoned putting green. It's in a glade by the river, upstaged by other, louder, Victorian sculptures, between the Western Infirmary and the university, easily missed. A bronze twig, Schotz's The Psalmist is a tree-figure made of gnarled green metal branches. His head becomes his body becomes his arms becomes his staff. He might be a shepherd or a musician playing a lyre. He is both ancestor and contemporary; the old world and the new.  Stanley Spencer is more famous for belonging to Port Glasgow, down the coast, than to the West End but he lodged in Coleburn Place, too, down the road. In the basement, the Hunterian presents a small Visitation. An awkward girl shies away from a fearsome angel dressed as a nanny, blue and white frocked, starched and scary. Spenser turned the whole of Glasgow upside down, like a schoolgirl turning somersaults on a bar, her patterned skirt billowing up like a hot air balloon.  Today is May and I'm looking out of my eyrie kitchen window at the sky. Along the rim of the houses that edge the hill of Fergus Drive, the blue's so bright and almost white that it hurts your eyes. It's the palest aquamarine, the colour of babies and promise, just a hint, nothing formed. Where the chimneys are, it's deeper, a solid matter-of-fact children's drawing of the sky the colour of chunky scribbled crayons in chubby fingers. And up, furthest, at the edge of my window frame before it turns into my kitchen ceiling, the blue's gone all ethereal: a Renaissance Madonna's cloak, majestic. Centuries past, when people looked at the sky they thought it was liquid. The sky itself, they thought, was wet. It had biblical authority, from Genesis.  People thought that celestial streams rained down from the heavens affecting the very skin and hair of man, influencing the vigour and growth of plants and trees, getting into the dust of rocks and stones. We've known that all along in Glasgow. The dear green place has never lacked for water. Schotz's sculpture The Psalmist, standing by the river, knows it. Composing on a lyre, this woody Christ is listening to heaven while he plays the music of the earth.  · Runner-up Kate Robinson, 39, is a Glasgow-based sculptor who has just returned from working in Portugal
The runner-up in the Guardian/Modern Painters art criticism competition, Kate Robinson, explores her home town's artistic heritage, including Benno Schotz's sculpture The Psalmist.