Texture Study I

Sunset over a wide, flat estuary, but the clouds have been built out of what look like broken tiles. Scott Naismith works with a palette knife, dragging and pressing thick oil paint so it leaves squared-off edges rather than blended wisps. Follow the top left of the sky and you will see flat plates of grey-blue and mauve stacked like slate, while the centre burns yellow and orange where the sun is breaking through. Below, a hard band of magenta and crimson marks the horizon, and the water picks up the light in long streaks of apricot and pale lilac.

The title is a clue to what this one is really about. A "texture study" is the artist testing how far paint can be pushed as a physical substance, so the picture is as much about the ridges and lumps of pigment as it is about weather over a Scottish coast. Naismith is based in Glasgow and has spent years painting the skies of Skye and the Hebrides, where fast-moving cloud and low light give him plenty of material. He talks about being interested in the science of it too, how moisture in the air scatters colour, which is why his skies often push into pinks and violets that sound unlikely but turn out to be accurate.

His signature sits at the lower right in dark paint, scratched in rather than written, one last mark from the same knife that shaped the clouds.