In the last six months, every time I was in Edinburgh, I found myself drawn to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Although I love this gallery, an oasis of calm away from the hubbub of Princes Street, the main reason I kept going back was to see Alison Watt’s A Portrait Without Likeness.
This exhibition, which closed a few weeks ago, featured a beautiful new suite of still-life paintings created by Greenock-born Watt in response to portraits and drawings by celebrated 18th-Century portrait painter Allan Ramsay.
The good news for anyone who missed the exhibition, is that a new version is now at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery.
Included are loans from the National Galleries of Scotland, including a portrait of Ramsay’s second wife, eight original drawings and a sketchbook, which inspired Watt to home in on lush detail. To that end, she has painted feathers, flowers, ribbons, books – and even a cabbage leaf.
A Portrait Without Likeness represents a shift in direction for Watt from intricate, large-scale paintings of drapery and folds. Her facility to zero in on detail is still there, and even though there are no figures in A Portrait Without Likeness, they are still lurking; in the tendrils of a feather or the spine and veins of a leaf.
These paintings shimmer with Watt’s usual mastery of form, tone and precise application of oil paint. It sounds strange to write this, but “in the flesh”, there is an intoxicating sensuality to all these works.
For this version of the exhibition, a different set of Ramsay originals are selected. Looking at these delicate drawings of hands made with red chalk on buff paper more than 250 years ago alongside Watt’s more recent paintings, it’s possible to trace a direct line from past to present.
A Portrait Without Likeness runs until April 2
Grayson Perry is a great communicator when it comes to both making art and talking about it. His own art tackles contemporary life head-on.
If you make your way to the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock, you’ll find vintage Perry now being served in the form of six large tapestries, which chart a “class journey” made by a fictional character called young Tim Rakewell, who featured in All In The Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry on Channel 4 in 2012. The show runs until April 26.
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