Description
Oil on board
Dimensions
25.5cm x 18cm (10in x 7in)
Footnote
Provenance:Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow
Note: Alison Watt is today best known for her crisp, elegant explorations of swathes of fabric in a palette severely limited to a spectrum of whites, off-whites and greys. With many high profile exhibitions and commissions surrounding this latter direction of her career, it is easy to forget that her origin, and indeed the area in which she initially found fame, was exclusively based in figuration and portraiture.
Born in Greenock in 1965, Watt went on to study at the Glasgow School of Art, graduating in the late 1980s as part of a remarkable wave of neo-figurative painters; her peers including Stephen Conroy and Ken Currie. In 1987 Watt won the National Portrait Gallery's annual award, which secured her the representation of some of the country's leading galleries including Marlborough Fine Art in London.
In 1997, a decade on, Watt began to introduce her now famous folds of fabric to the backdrops of her portraiture, an angle she continued to cultivate and evolve until she had moved away from the figure altogether. This has made her earlier figurative output all the more desirable, being, as it is, scarce to the open market.
Though not strictly self-portraiture, Watt frequently drew upon her own appearance in her work, deliberately lending her figures a homogenised and androgynous look; the elongated oval heads distinguished by a long straight nose and full mouth with a pronounced cleft to the upper lip. The distinctive look of her figures is at once classical and entirely modern, and one can trace the influence of artists from Ingres in the painstaking finish of the works, to Freud in the restraint of the palette and the deliberate focus away from typical ideals of beauty.