Caught in the Light

Born in Ayrshire, Claire Beattie 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.

She has shown her oil paintings professionally throughout the UK since 2008. Her work, inspired by the Scottish Borders landscape where she lives and works, 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. Claire is a member of the Society of Scottish Artists and Visual Arts Scotland and she has had four successful solo exhibitions since 2013.

Landscape has always been a source of inspiration. A solitary motif such as a single tree is a recurrent theme alongside strong horizontal areas suggesting a more abstract visual language. Claire likes to return to subjects again and again – hay bales strewn across stubble fields, the familiar outline of the Eildon Hills, the stark shape of the Bass Rock.

Claire continually looks at the colours within a colour and layers them up on her 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 she visit and that are familiar to her, Claire wants her work to have a sense of contemplation and calm but also, like a memory or a moment that comes briefly into focus, she wants the work to glow and to resonate.