Scottish artist reveals her new direction in still life
SHE is the lauded Scottish painter known for her ambiguous, ghostly depictions of drapes and folded fabrics.
However, in a new exhibition to be unveiled in Cumbria, Alison Watt has signalled a shift from her signature motifs.
Her latest creations focus on objects such as tangled and hooped ropes, strings and coils, as well as stark images of folded plain paper.
Ms Watt’s work adorns landmark buildings such as the Scottish Parliament, the National Galleries of Scotland and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery.
She also has major pieces in the Old Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Edinburgh and the Uffizi gallery in Florence.
This week, The Herald was granted an early look at her paintings for A Shadow on the Blind, a new exhibition at the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal which will open on October 12.
The Glasgow School of Art graduate said that she had been partially inspired by a work in the National Gallery of Scotland – a mysterious late 17th or early 18th century still-life by the artist Thomas Warrender. She said: “I’m fascinated by how, historically, painters look back on what has come before. In some ways that it is a pure form of admiration, hoping some of the greatness will rub off on you, that you will learn something.
“It’s Warrender’s only painting, so it is hard not to think about that – you wonder did he make others and they were destroyed?
“Did he put everything into this painting?
“Of all the objects he painted, there are several pieces of folded paper, and they were what drew me to that painting.
“There is something so satisfying about a piece of paper, the light and shade, but also, symbolically, it is weighty.
“I kept going back to it. It’s an odd painting and curious – it’s strange in scale and the way it has been painted, and, when you look at it, you feel off-kilter... i think there is something about being drawn into a picture by something you think you know, but you don’t.”
The hooped coils, Ms Watt said, were not painted from life but from her imagination.
The new paintings are also, like much of Watt’s work, inspired by the details of Old Master paintings, notably still lives.
She said: “The still life is often quiet.
“It is not grand, and is often associated with the domestic, and so the feminine. It has often a lowly position and it is all these qualities about the still life that I find attractive, because its greatest power is its intimacy.”
Ms Watt said that she found particular satisfaction in exploring the objects within new and unfamiliar contexts.
She added: “I love the idea of isolating these objects, taking them away from their original narratives, as we often do in our minds, and exploring a different narrative for them.”
I love the idea of isolating these objects, taking them away from their original narratives