Why does alison watt painter

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The Fleming Collection. The Scottish Parliament. If the art world is a Monopoly board, Alison Watt advanced straight to Mayfair. Over the past two decades, Watt has departed from the accessible, accomplished portraiture of her early works — her depiction of Elizabeth Senior showed a smiling grandmother in a spotty satin dress, teacup by her side — immersing herself in the time-honoured pursuit of capturing fabric in paint.

In the upstairs gallery, three near-identical works — Iris —15 , Moor and Himation — each depict a white sheet gathered in pleats around an ellipse, darkening towards an opening at the base. These are the most overtly sexual paintings on show and map the female anatomy with precision. Elsewhere, tropes of feminine sexuality abound, in soft-focus curves, mysterious interiors and bridal whites, coupled with titles — Venus , Slip , Pearl — drawn from a vocabulary of jewellery, underwear, goddesses and flowers.

Here, the fabric is plumper — less Egyptian cotton bed-sheet, more luxury towelling robe — and wintery blues chill the shadows. In the downstairs gallery are a number of smaller, fabric-free paintings, also concerned with symbolic openings and modulations of light. It's really fascinating: the fact that there's always that feeling of looking for a resolution, something that never comes.

It pushes you forward. On prolonged looking But one of the best parts of the residency is that you have out-of-hours access to pictures, so you can visit the paintings for as long as you want to, whenever you want to, and that kind of magnifies the experience because you realise that these paintings just do not reveal themselves.

A great painting is something that, when you come back to it, is perpetually new and constantly throwing up things that are unexpected, so it means that the experience just goes on and on.

Prolonged looking has become a really important part of my practice. On the Venus Frigida It's such an unusual picture because his portrayal of Venus is unlike any other — we're used to seeing Venus looking languid in warm surroundings and in this painting she's crouching and shivering in a glowering landscape.

And then the structure of the picture is very complex, firstly because Venus's back is to the viewer and also because the three figures in the painting create an arc, so the geometry is very interesting.

When I realised this, I noticed that in my own paintings, the shape of an arc had occurred — when you engage with a picture in that way I think it begins to take over; the more aware that you are of its spatial complexity, the more it has an effect on the paintings that you're making. So the paintings in the show have been very much influenced by Venus Frigida.

On the occasion of an exhibition at the Fruitmaker Gallery in Edinburgh in , her work began to focus increasingly on the rendering of fabrics. Watt works on large-format canvases, which she paints alone, using scaffolding. Her colour of choice is white, which she blends with ochre, sienna, vermilion, grey, and black pigments to produce realistically modelled draperies of an almost sculptural nature. She exploits the suggestive power of drapery, producing chaste evocations of the presence or absence of a body: the empty sheets on a bed, the pleats of a dress, the loincloth of Christ.

In she became the youngest artist to present a monographic exhibition, Shift , at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. She then turned to a form of abstraction, exhibiting her polyptych Still and six other canvases at the Ingleby Gallery during the Edinburgh Festival. That same year, she exhibited the series Dark Light , which consisted of pictures of deep black swathes of fabric presented in a closed cubic space.