JANUARY 2017. The soundtrack to all our lives here in Scotland in the early days of a dreich new year has been a mixter-maxter of high winds blowing in from the Arctic and an incessant media babble ahead of Donald Trump's ascension to the Presidency of the United States of America. That and how soft/hard/medium-baked Brexit will be…

What a joy then to walk in Glasgow Print Studio last Saturday to find a shiny potato print featuring two golden floating heads which goes by the name of Heaven on Earth.

I'm fairly certain that presenting a humble potato print in an exhibition devoted to artists working at the top of their game in the medium of printmaking is the ultimate printmakers' in-joke but it made my day.

This glowing double portrait is by Stephen Chambers RA. Further inspection of the exhibition notes reveals the potato used to make the print was grown by the artist in his garden and cut on his kitchen table before being "printed in gold."

I like the cut of Stephen Chambers' gib instantly. Primarily a painter, who claims to be a newcomer to printmaking, there is an array of lithographs, screen prints and etchings by Chambers on show which are on one hand, blackly humorous and shocking, and on the other, a joy to behold.

Disasters of War is a case in point. One of six lithographs from his Portrait of a Pre-Caffeinated Mind series, it brings blood-red precision and double-take horror to the business of war. In all directions, cartoon figures, in the form of black numerals illuminate the many and varied ways in which wars can wreak havoc.

Academicians IV is the fourth in a series of exhibitions staged by Glasgow Print Studio which brings together the work of four well-respected Royal and Royal Scottish Academicians. The "masters" whose work is featured are Annie Cattrell, RSA, Stephen Chambers RA, Kate Downie, RSA, and Christopher Le Brun, PRA.

The exhibition has been running since November, but I hadn't managed to see it. I'm so glad I made the effort as there is much to savour. The layered glister of Annie Cattrell's glass work, Conditions, sits at the heart of of the space. Cattrell was born in Glasgow and studied Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Ulster, before going on to specialise in ceramics and glass at the Royal College of Art in London, where she has lectured since 2000.

Cattrell's abiding interest is the point at which art, science and the poetic meet. Conditions consists of six glass rectangular columns on a wooden plinth which are around a foot tall. Finely etched marks contained inside the glass refract and reduce, depending on the direction from which they are viewed.

The solidity of the glass and the ethereal nature of these mini-clouds inside the glass combine to make the work as a whole both a thing of beauty and a puzzle. I kept coming back to it in-between looking at the other work on show.

Cottrell uses cutting-edge technologies to great effect. In two prints, Observed – Night and Observed – Day, she has combined topographical satellite images, taken over a 40-year period, of water on the surface of Australia. The results are hauntingly beautiful.

Christopher Le Brun has been President of the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London since 2011. His paintings were included in the emerging artists section of the 1982 Venice Biennale and and he has since exhibited around the world in major public galleries.

Never one to be hemmed in by medium, there's a mixture of his paintings, sculpture, wood-cuts on show here and even a large-scale tapestry. Colour lies at the heart of it all, even in his large livid green bronze sculptures Wave II and Cut.

Le Brun's work plays tricks with your eye as a viewer. I found myself thinking his large woodcut, Strand, with its abstract red and white energy pulsing off the paper, was a painting. Back home, I looked on the RA website and found that in the absence of a printing press, he had transferred the image from woodblock to paper using the pressure of the back of a kitchen spoon. Hence the beautifully crude quality.

Kate Downie's work will be familiar to many art lovers in Scotland. Never one to stand on the spot repeating old visual mantras, master mark-maker Downie has shifted the direction of her work yet again. In the last five years she has studied ink painting and contemporary culture in China through many visits and residencies, including lessons in Chinese seal carving with a master calligrapher in Beijing in 2015.

A new series of screenprints made at Glasgow Print Studio are inspired by what she has seen and learned in China. Downie has (literally) taken off in another direction by making work inspired by train journeys across Scotland.

Gold stars all round for this wee gem of an exhibition.

Academicians IV, Glasgow Print Studio, Trongate 103, until January 22

glasgowprintstudio.co.uk