Claire Beattie
Born in Ayrshire, I grew up in Spey Bay on the Moray coast, before graduating with an MA in Fine Art from the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art with a distinction in painting in 1997.
I have shown my oil paintings professionally throughout the UK since 2008. My work, inspired by the Scottish Borders landscape where I live and work, is in many private collections in the UK and worldwide, and has been shown several times at the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Glasgow Institute. I am a member of the Society of Scottish Artists and Visual Arts Scotland and I have had four successful solo exhibitions since 2013.
Landscape has always been a source of inspiration. It stops me in my tracks daily – the colour, light, and immense quiet drawing me in, and I make paintings which respond to this. A solitary motif such as a single tree is a recurrent theme alongside strong horizontal areas suggesting a more abstract visual language. I like to return to subjects again and again – isolated trees, hay bales strewn across stubble fields, the familiar outline of the Eildon Hills, the stark shape of the Bass Rock.
I am obsessed with looking at the colours within a colour and layering them up on my painting surface to create subtle depth and impact. A grassy field has undertones of russet and yellow and pink. A dark hillside has orange and vermilion and magenta – all very low key, but still there fizzing away.
Like the meditative and reflective spaces I visit and that are familiar to me, I want my work to have a sense of contemplation and calm but also, like a memory or a moment that comes briefly into focus, I want the work to glow and to resonate.
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