Michael Mackenzie meets Peter Standen to discuss his upcoming apocalyptic exhibition.

Peter Standen's house in Portobello is not the best place for his artworks to be exhibited. If they're not displayed on the wall (the walls are filled from top to bottom with canvases) then they're in storage space or, as is the case with the work to be exhibited at the end of this week, standing propped up against the wall hidden from view. In the entrance hallway to his ‘ studio’, as though Standen was tired of framing and hanging, he has painted a gigantic mural piece with trees that stretches from wall to ceiling over anyone happening to visit this darkly humorous artist at home.

Standen's work tends to portray apocalyptic scenes of Edinburgh or Glasgow. His etching Grand Finale depicts a tsunami about to crash through North Bridge at rush hour, whales and all, while the not-so-extinct volcano Arthur's Seat shoots lava into the sky. He tells me the whales are a joke referring to Greenpeace and the WWF – after our attempts to save the whales, they only end up destroying Waverley station.

His black humour aside, I asked him if his work had any particular message he wished to drive home; adding humour to climate change seems to strip his work of the environmental warning it could have had. Standen tells me about one of his early paintings of St. Paul's cathedral: “it had fallen down in such a way as to reveal its internal structure. It was admiration for the building, really. A lot of people saw it and asked me if it was after the holocaust. And I said, well, it's after the passage of time, which is the ultimate holocaust I suppose.”

Upon seeing his Edinburgh etchings for the first time, people remarked: “you must really hate Edinburgh!” But it isn't for a hatred of Edinburgh that he destroys it; it's rather an appreciation of its architecture. Standen blames an early fascination with drawing and exploring ruins for his imagined destruction of the city we live in.

There is something very satisfying in seeing everything but the top of Calton Hill drowned in water, or George Street inhabited only by emerging palm trees. As much as we may love it, this is the city we're trying to get away from when we go to an art gallery. In times of stress, pushing your way through the crowds on North Bridge, it is rather more calming than suffocating to imagine everything subsumed in a giant tidal wave.

He sees a “back to Eden” theme in these paintings and etchings: “it's a world, going back to the Iron Age really, with the Saxons making cottages in the ruins of Londinium, that sort of thing – a more relaxed age.” Though he notes that, now he's a bit older, he's not sure how much of an ideal vision this really is. “And anyway,” he adds, “I'm not sure how relaxed the Saxon age really was.”

Self-deprecating and not at all pretentious, Standen is an artist who works for the enjoyment of it. He showed me his self-made paper left out to dry. There are always variations in colour and texture, as a result of the making process, so even though he makes prints of his work, each one is always different.

He enjoys working with etchings because the process is so tactile; everything he produces is hand-crafted in an organic way. In a sense, there is something very refreshing in his printmaking because everything is so evidently unique.

Some of the works going on display at Henderson's gallery have not been seen by Standen himself for years. They will be put on display where they should be, for anyone who wishes to see, rather than piled on top of each other due to spacing issues. Whether you really hate Edinburgh, or just wouldn't mind seeing a giant whale crushing it, Future Cityscapes will ease your city-based tensions with works that haven't been seen by human eyes for far too long.

Peter Standen's Future Cityscapes is running until the 2nd of December at The Henderson Gallery (Free).