Skye Texture Tapestry

A burst of orange light punches through a bank of magenta and blue clouds over the Isle of Skye, and everything below it responds. The hills flatten into deep purple silhouettes, the loch catches the glare in ribbons of red and gold, and then, in the foreground, the whole scene falls apart into confetti. Those chips of turquoise, crimson, black and yellow are not really water anymore. They are Scott Naismith's shorthand for what light does when it hits a wet, broken surface and scatters.

Naismith is a Glasgow-based painter who trained at the Glasgow School of Art and has spent years returning to the same Scottish places: Skye, Glencoe, Loch Lomond. He is interested in how weather bends colour, and he often talks about pushing a landscape until it sits right on the line between recognisable and abstract. He builds his surfaces with a palette knife rather than a brush, laying paint down in thick slabs, which is where the "texture" in the title comes from. Get near the actual canvas and you can see ridges of dried oil standing proud of the surface, catching real light alongside the painted kind.

The trick with a painting like this is that the sky is fairly faithful to how a Hebridean sunset actually behaves, while the foreground is pure invention. Naismith lets the two meet in the middle of the picture, and the join is where most of the interest lies.