Skye Haze

The water at the bottom of this painting has been broken into hundreds of flat little shards, laid down with a palette knife in violet, turquoise, orange and coral. It looks almost like tilework or shattered glass, yet read from a distance it snaps into place as the surface of a sea loch catching a low sun. Above it, a bank of magenta and plum cloud parts to let a burst of white light through, and the horizon dissolves into a pale band where sky and water refuse to separate. That blurring is the haze of the title, and it is the whole point of the picture.

Scott Naismith is a Glasgow-based painter who trained at the Glasgow School of Art and has spent years returning to the Isle of Skye, usually working from memory and photographs rather than sitting out in the weather. He is unusually interested in the physics of what he paints, particularly how water vapour in the air scatters light and pushes colours toward pinks, purples and golds. So while the colours here look invented, they come from a real observation about Scottish air, which holds a great deal of moisture and does strange things to sunsets. His work sits in a long tradition of Scottish landscape painting, pulled toward abstraction and given a thick, physical surface you can see the knife marks in.