Rhythm of Rock and Light

Magenta clouds shouldn't work above a Scottish sea loch, but Scott Naismith makes them feel almost plausible. A band of hot pink and turquoise piles up over grey hills, a burst of cadmium yellow sits where the sun has broken through, and the whole display comes down again in the water below, chopped into blocks of colour by the palette knife. The shoreline in the middle is the roughest part of the painting: thick slabs of black, pink and blue applied in a hurry, standing in for wet rock without describing a single stone.

Naismith is a Glasgow based artist who trained at the Glasgow School of Art and has spent years painting the west coast of Scotland, particularly Skye and the sea lochs, where weather changes faster than paint dries. His approach sits between landscape and abstraction: the shapes come from real places, but the colour is pushed far past what a camera would record, because he treats colour as the carrier of feeling rather than a record of fact.