Spirit Echoes

That towering mass of cloud sits right at the centre of everything, lit up from behind in peach, apricot and hot pink, while its underside sinks into bruised purple. Below it, the sea does something odd: instead of rippling, it breaks into flat, hard-edged shapes, like a pane of coloured glass that has been dropped and put back together slightly wrong. Those angular facets of orange and magenta are Scott Naismith's signature move, and they turn a reflection into something closer to a pattern. The far left of the painting stays cool and misty, so the whole canvas reads as weather in transition, one system rolling over another.

Naismith is a Scottish painter based near Glasgow, and his subject is almost always the sky over the west coast and the islands, places like Skye and Harris where the light changes by the minute. He is genuinely interested in the science of it, the way water droplets scatter sunlight into those specific colours, and he pushes the results further than the eye would actually see. He builds his surfaces with thick oil paint and palette knife, leaving broad swipes and blunt edges visible rather than blending them away. The result belongs to a lively strand of contemporary landscape painting that keeps one foot in real places and the other in pure colour, and it works best if you let the faceted water be strange rather than expecting it to behave like the sea.