Watt: Driven To Abstraction

This is Watt's way of illustrating the point she's been making. Over 20 years into her career, at the age of 41, she has come to the conclusion that any attempt to explain visual art is "completely pointless". "It's like trying to describe a sensation," says Watt. "How do you do that? These things, by their nature, are supposed to work on a level beyond words. If they're good, you can look at other people's art and feel as if they know you. There's a recognition. That's amazing. Totally amazing. And at risk of sounding pretentious, it's really mysterious."

She is not claiming that her own paintings belong in that class. But she doesn't think the pictures around us do either. We're in an empty, echoing room off the lounge in Edinburgh's Home House private members' club, formerly The Hallion. There are canvas prints on the walls, and Watt was compelled by professional curiosity, or the artist's equivalent, to walk around before sitting down. She will later say she needs to "feel something" when looking at pictures, and apparently has no such emotional response to these digitally manipulated photographs of Gibson guitars and girls in their underwear.

I ask if looking at work she considers "bad" makes her feel better about her own. "Oh," she says, dismayed. "Oh no. I really hope not. I don't think schadenfraude is very healthy, or useful."

There is, in fact, nothing that would make Watt feel good about her own work. She is here on a one-hour break from installing her new piece nearby at the Ingleby Gallery. "I am experiencing," she says, "the same sickening fear I always get when I let go of something I've been keeping to myself. The prospect of disaster and ridicule and great plagues "

Physically, Dark Light is the biggest project she has ever taken on - an anodised steel cube with a door in one side, which opens to reveal a black chamber, where her paintings of cloth on the inner walls and ceiling only come into focus as the eyes adjust. "It is," according to a statement released by the gallery, "a painting that can literally be stepped into."

Watt herself calls it "an experiment". The only intention she had that she can actually articulate was to "create something odd and strange", and the closest thing she has to a plan is her hope that everyone who goes in to it will come out affected in their own way. She doesn't know if it will succeed for anyone else, because she's not even sure it works for her.

"I did feel the beginnings of it this morning," she says, "which was the longest time I'd spent inside. It had this weird effect on me, and it wasn't necessarily a good one. There was a moment when I had to get out. There was a beautiful winter sun shining through the gallery, so coming to that from the piece was like being snowblind. What's going on in there is completely at odds with what's happening outside."

Putting it together today is taking longer than Watt and her collaborators expected. The cube itself was built by Ronnie Watt (no relation) and his firm Designs In Metal. Richard Ingleby has custom-fitted it to his gallery floor. This is the first time she has enlisted others to help her realise a piece of work, and she has not found it much easier than the solitary act of painting: "Instead of having conversations with yourself about a piece, you're having to externalise all that. So everything is intensified threefold."

She says they are all equally dedicated to making it "absolutely perfect". In technical terms, this comes down to "lots of little things a floor that may look level isn't".

Artistically though, only Watt can know what she means by "perfect", and she can no more explain it than achieve it - she has never been satisfied with anything she's done. Not the portrait of the Queen Mother that she was famously commissioned to paint while still a student at Glasgow School Of Art. Not Marat And The Fishes, now hanging in the refurbished Kelvingrove gallery. And probably not Dark Light.

"It's almost impossible to feel satisfied, and if you do, it's so short-lived. I felt it for a moment with Still her vast four-panel painting of empty white shrouds, permanently installed at Edinburgh's St Paul's Church in 2004 but then it was over. People tell me it must be lovely doing exactly what I want to do, but there is no pleasure in it. It's hard to say what drives yout to make work, but I think if you felt satisfied or resolved within yourself, then you wouldn't do it."

And yet Watt has wanted to create art for so long that she can't remember even making the decision. "Ever since I was consciously thinking," she says, "I knew I was going to paint. I realise that's a bit weird."

Not when you consider that her father was a landscape painter, who showed her the works by Ferguson and Courbet that their local museum in Greenock had acquired in the town's wealthier days. He was also a Catholic, and took her as far as he could, to see as many great religious paintings as possible, from as young an age as she could feasibly be affected (there is a photograph, she tells me, of a seven-year-old Watt standing outside the London National Gallery in red flares, which makes her claim that it is now her "spiritual home" sound like something more than mere enthusiasm).

"Some of the best art ever made," she says, "has come from commissions by the Catholic church." She doesn't practise the faith, and has never painted saints, but the influence is still there in her recent work. Maybe that's what the title of Still actually means. There are no divine or even human figures inside its swathes of white fabric - no bodies have appeared in Watt's work for a decade or so - but who said God was visible? Richard Holloway has said the piece "proclaims the presence of an absence, but a very strange absence".

You could say the same of everything she has produced since her 1997 show Fold. Because finished work is the only part of the process that anyone gets to see, it's hard not to think of an artist's development as a series of epiphanies. It suits biographers, for example, to imagine a moment when Jackson Pollock splashed paint on a canvas by accident, and decided that it looked alright.

In Watt's case, I want to know if she remembers when she got the idea to ease people out of her pictures. And she can answer that question more readily than simpler ones you might ask about her journalist husband Ruaridh Nicoll, or whether she plans to have kids while she can (she reserves her right to privacy on this subject), or if she plans to stay in London making art for the rest of her life (Watt loves the place for its "anonymity", misses Scotland for "the conversation", but can't think beyond Spring 2008, when she'll show what she has been working on at the National Gallery).

"It wasn't quite eureka'," she says, "and I didn't realise at the time, but I do remember a moment ... when I left art school, I worked with female life models practically every day for 10 years. Towards the end of that period, something changed, a sort of breaking down happened in the looking process, and the women started to become a series of lines and creases and folds. I remember a model leaving the studio one day, and there was a sort of sadness attached to her going away. She left a sort of imprint on the piece of fabric that she had been sitting on. There was something beautiful about the fact that she had left, but there was still something about her in the room."

What seems, in biographical terms, like a break in Watt's career between early figurative work and ongoing, mid-period abstraction, feels "absolutely continuous" to the artist herself. "If I look back at my work, from Glasgow School Of Art to now, I can see a very natural trajectory. But only in retrospect."

On the day she started at the school in the mid-1980s, one head of department told the assembled students, by way of encouragement, that the GSA had "a fantastic rate of employment". "He said 99% of us could end up nurses, or work in record shops." But Watt's peers included Douglas Gordon, Ken Currie, Peter Howson, and other new Glasgow boys and girls who went on "to make art as a lifetime choice".

A friend who taught there at the time has since told her it was the most competitive art school he ever worked in. Asked if she played her part in that, Watt says she was only "competing with myself". Asked if she feels any sense of belonging to a distinctly successful generation of Scottish artists, she says the "Scottish" aspect means nothing to her. "I think a lot of art is made in this country despite the establishment, not because of it."

This will sound ungrateful to some - Dark Light has been part-funded by a Creative Scotland Award - but the only thing she actually enjoys about painting is "independence from others' opinions".

Others have suggested that Watt is a much shrewder self-publicist than she appears, but the only sign I pick up this afternoon is her speaking so well after warnings of ineloquence. "It's hard enough to make work," as she says at one point, "without making it cynically."

BY the end of our hour she has spent less time talking about her own new project than Douglas Gordon's last Edinburgh show, the poetry of Edwin Morgan, and the Velazquez exhibition that just finished at the National Gallery.

"I miss it," she says of that show. "I'm still in mourning." As the gallery's artist-in-residence, Watt was free to see it without the public, and was there when Margaret Thatcher came to a private viewing. "People were staring at her as much as the paintings. I couldn't help doing it myself, even though I spent my whole student life hating that woman. It was so bizarre to see this slightly ludicrous figure, with her handbag and bodyguards and a couple of nurses. She caused all that anguish, and she's no bigger than me." Does Watt consider someone like Thatcher morally incapable of appreciating Velazquez? "That's what I want to think. I refuse to believe that she and I are touched by the same things."

When Watt finishes putting Dark Light together, "some time after midnight", she'll head back to her spiritual home. She is bothered by the fact that she's already forgetting some of the details from her favourite Zurbaran painting. The "strange absence" that marks out her own work might be affecting her perception of art in general. "A friend of mine, a poet, said he was disturbed by the fact that whenever he was away from the person he loved, he couldn't remember her face. I've been wondering if paintings are the same. If you can love one so much, and become so intensely involved, that you have to be physically present with it."

Zurbaran, by the way, "actually believed that his paintings brought him closer to God". I ask if Watt envies that kind of conviction. She seems taken aback, and says something about the impossibility of knowing what her own work is about. "It's not for me to attach meaning ... "

I suppose I'm free, then, to interpret her new metal cube as some kind of metaphor for the mind of the artist. While you stand outside, she's in there working. When you go inside she's gone, leaving you alone, in the dark, with the painting.

Dark Light is at the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh from February 9 to April 5