Top Scots artist unveils 'suggestive' paintings in the US

Published on Saturday 27 February 2010 19:20

"HIGHLY suggestive" new paintings by the leading Scottish artist Alison Watt will be unveiled tomorrow to mark the painter's attempts to break through into the international market.

The two large canvases, called Hollow, are evocative images of shadowy folds of white fabric around a dark centre.

The images – published for the first time in Scotland on Sunday today – are typical of Greenock-born Watt's work exploring the sensuality of the female form.

But the artist, whose bigger canvases sell for in excess of 30,000, says they have a "higher sexual content" than any of her previous paintings.

"In terms of the way the work is developing, I'd say they were pretty intense images," Watt said. "I would say they have perhaps a higher sexual content. They are pretty full-on."

The 6ft square paintings, which, together with two smaller versions, took Watt almost a year to produce, will go on show in the US this week.

Edinburgh gallery owner Richard Ingleby, who has arranged the exhibition at the New York Armory, one of the US's leading contemporary art showcases, said: "I refer to them as suggestive and they clearly are. That's what you get with Alison Watt who is always willing to push the boundaries.

"Read into them what you will. As with anything, you could find what you like in them. Some people will respond to them that way, and some people absolutely will not."

It is yet to be seen how Watt's latest work will go down in the US. She has not exhibited there for about 15 years.

But hopes that her impressive UK success will turn global are growing, with an invitation to join a show of women artists at Florence's historic Uffizi gallery later this year.

The goal, said Ingleby, is "to do great things in a world that is wider than the world she's existed in thus far.

"Sure she's going to move around, but Scotland will always be her bedrock."

In December, Watt, a Glasgow School of Art graduate and the youngest artist to be given a residency at the National Gallery in London – as well as the first Scottish artist – completed her three years with the production of Hollow.

Awarded an OBE in 2008 for her services to art, she has been in demand since leaving the Glasgow college in the late 1980s with her works rising in value. A small, early portrait, only a few inches square, recently sold for 2,800 at auction in Glasgow.

But as her work has evolved from beautifully-executed, pale portraits and nudes, to sensuous, abstract fabric paintings, her world-wide exposure has been limited by her limited output.

"The trouble with me is I don't make very many paintings," she confesses. "I only make about four paintings a year, which leaves everyone tearing their hair out, including me."

Watt won a commission to paint a portrait of the late Queen Mother and another of her works hangs in the Scottish Parliament. But perhaps her best known painting is Phantom, bought for the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art in 2008, at a cost of 45,000.

Purchased jointly by the Art Fund and The National Museums of Scotland, it was inspired by a painting, St Francis in Meditation, by the 17th-century Spanish master Francisco de Zurbaran, in the National Gallery collection.