Texture Study III

Slabs of paint sit on this canvas like tiles, each one laid down with a palette knife and left alone. Scott Naismith, a Scottish painter based near Glasgow, builds his skies this way, letting the edges of one colour bump against the next instead of blending them smooth. Turquoise squares press into hot pink, tangerine bleeds toward violet, and somewhere behind it all a sun is going down over water. Squint and it reads as a real evening over a Highland loch. Get close and it falls apart into pure marks of thick oil paint.

The title says exactly what it is: a study in texture, one of a series where Naismith tests how far he can push surface and colour before a landscape stops being a landscape. He has spoken about being fascinated by how light scatters through moisture in the air, which is why Scotland suits him so well, with weather that changes by the minute. The lower half of the painting is worth a second glance, where the same colours reappear in long horizontal smears across wet sand and shallow water, flattened and stretched out. It is the sky again, only lying down.