Morar

The sun has almost gone here, sitting low enough to lay a broad stripe of gold straight down the water toward us. Above it, the clouds break apart into slabs of navy and violet, laid on with a palette knife in flat, deliberate strokes that never quite blend. Scott Naismith paints this way on purpose: up close the surface looks like a pile of coloured tiles, but step back and it snaps into sky. The dark headlands on either side frame a view out to the small islands on the horizon, and in the foreground a scrubby bush and a scatter of green and orange marks stand in for coastal grass and rock.

Morar sits on Scotland's west coast, just south of Mallaig, famous for its white beaches and the long views across to Eigg, Rum and the hills of Skye. Naismith, who trained at Glasgow School of Art and works from a studio near Glasgow, returns to this stretch of coast again and again, drawn to what happens when Atlantic weather meets low sun. He is more interested in how light bends and splits through cloud than in copying the landscape exactly, which is why his colours run hotter and stranger than a photograph would allow. Whether that reads as truthful or as pleasant exaggeration probably depends on how many west coast sunsets you have stood through yourself.