Low Tide Texture

Orange clouds burn at the centre of this sky like coals, ringed by pink and magenta and then cooling into deep blue at the top of the canvas. Below them, a thin dark line of islands marks the horizon, and everything beneath it dissolves into flat, angular patches of colour: turquoise, lemon yellow, lilac, and pale sand. Those facets are wet sand and shallow pools left behind by the sea, each one catching a slightly different piece of the sky. It is a beach at low tide, though Scott Naismith is less interested in describing the sand grain by grain than in showing you what colour does when light hits water.

Naismith is a Glasgow based painter who studied at the Glasgow School of Art and has spent much of his career working from the west coast of Scotland and the Hebrides, places where weather changes by the minute and light behaves unpredictably. He builds paintings like this with a palette knife, laying down blocks and slabs of paint rather than blending them, which is why the foreground looks almost like broken glass or a mosaic. Colour theory is a genuine obsession of his, and he often pushes hues further than the eye would actually register, warm against cool, saturated against muted, to get at the sensation of a place rather than its exact appearance. Stand back and the shapes settle into a recognisable shoreline. Move closer and they come apart again into pure paint.