Golden Drift

The burst of orange and yellow in the upper left looks less like a sunset and more like something catching fire behind the clouds. Scott Naismith builds that glow with thick, blocky strokes of paint, and if you follow the edge of the cloud you can see where he dragged a palette knife across the surface, leaving small square marks like pixels. To the right, all that heat drains away into cool grey and mauve, the kind of weather front that rolls in over a Scottish coast while you are still watching the light. The horizon itself is barely a line, just a dark band of land with turquoise water spilling out in front of it.

Naismith is a Glasgow-based painter who trained at the Glasgow School of Art, and clouds have been his main subject for years. He is genuinely interested in the science behind them, how light scatters through water vapour and why a cloud can look gold on one side and grey on the other. That curiosity shows up here in the water, where he lays down strips of teal, jade and pale sand as flat blocks of colour rather than blending them. Stand back and they read as wet sand and shallow sea. Up close they are simply bands of pigment, which is part of the pleasure of looking at his work. He paints Skye, Loch Lomond and the west coast most often, though pieces like this one stay loose enough that they could be almost any shoreline at the end of the day.