Alison Watt is one of the UK’s most respected painters working today. Her oeuvre has gradually evolved since her figurative works first came to public attention at her sold out Glasgow School of Art degree show. She rose to prominence in 1987 after winning a commission to paint HM Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother.
Together with her compatriot Jenny Saville, Watt led the way in British figurative painting in the 1990s with a focussed, precise and intensely observed style which defied the tenets of the Young British Artists movement.
During the 1990s, the focus of Watt’s painting was highly realistic posed female forms. Working intensely with both life models and her own body, she focussed on producing composite images which led to subtle distortions of form.
Over time the figures left our line of sight, leaving only the suggestion of their presence, her paintings pushing almost to the point of abstraction in her famous canvases of minimalistic white drapery. The latest direction is markedly different again, though along a logical continuum. The figures have left the frame entirely and what remains is a psychological examination of their vestiges. Those familiar with her career will recognise that her work’s current iteration is the next step in her on-going exploration of, as she puts it, “the different ways in which a human being can be represented without being present…”.
Though an artist with a singular voice, her work is underpinned by a fascination with and debt to the precise and lusciously detailed work of the Old Masters. It was this aspect of her work that the Scottish National Portrait Gallery sought to explore in their exhibition ‘Alison Watt: A Portrait Without Likeness’, Edinburgh, 2021-2022, which juxtaposes Watt with the work of one of her great inspirations, Allan Ramsay. Watt immersed herself in the gallery’s collection of Ramsays, including accessing his archived sketchbooks. The resultant body of work was exhibited alongside two of his most celebrated portraits, that of his first and second wives.
Many of the aspects Watt admires in Ramsay’s work, she also shares: the simplicity and “geometry” of composition, balanced against the fine detail and delicacy of technique, and a depth of feeling tangible in the painting process itself. Ramsay’s portraiture is celebrated for its immense intimacy; his best work is frequently said to be of the interesting, intellectual women of his close acquaintance. Watt conveys that same intimacy in her past works, an unspoken narrative suggested in the quiet grandeur of her still lives. She raises gentle, unanswered questions about the objects’ symbolism. In Watt’s own words, the still life “can both offer you familiarity with an object, but also transcend the everyday.”