The death from ovarian cancer of Yvonne Hawker, at the age of 45, has robbed Scotland of one its most exciting visual artists.

Born in Madeira in 1956, Yvonne studied art at Goldsmith's College and Ravensbourne College, London. She moved to Scotland in the early 1980s with her former partner, the internationally renowned printmaker Richard Akerman. They bought and refurbished Black Clauchrie, a magnificent Victorian shooting lodge near the remote village of Barrhill in the south-west of Scotland.

Here, among the hills, lochs, and moorlands, Yvonne painted her haunting canvases, filled with gentle greys and greens and soft pale-blue textures, as she captured barns, stone walls, troughs, and landscapes. She fell in love with Scotland and, when her relationship with Richard Akerman ended, forcing the sale of Black Clauchrie, she moved to a stone shepherd's cottage, high on the old drover's trail behind the village of Colmonell. Yvonne transformed this dwelling into an artist's shrine. A white-walled downstairs room served as her studio. Here, Yvonne would work, sometimes through the night, while her springer spaniel, Wilfie, dozed before a crackling log fire.

Yvonne attracted a sparkling succession of visitors. Leading politicians, TV celebrities, and Hollywood actors beat a path to her door, attracted by her work and her enchanting appeal. Here, too, she threw herself into the life of the community, taking an active role

as artistic adviser to the Maclaurin Gallery in Ayr, where she helped to establish one of the most important

collections of contemporary British art in the country.

But dark clouds gathered on the horizon. ScottishPower shattered the idyllic charm of South Ayrshire when it announced plans for a (pounds) 200m electricity interconnector, linking Scotland and Northern Ireland. The project involved the construction of 45 miles of giant pylons from Coylton to Ballantrae, more than 20 of them running down the valley behind Kilrenzie, Yvonne's remote hilltop home.

Yvonne became an active leader of the Stop (Stop the Overhead Powerlines) campaign, which united thousands of protesters from south-west Scotland and County Antrim. She recruited high-level support from film-maker David Putt-nam, musician Jools Holland, and Hollywood movie star Brian Cox. The campaign led to two long-running public inquiries in Ayr and Larne, and held up the electricity project for six years. In a poignant moment during a formal session of the public inquiry in the village hall in

Barrhill, Yvonne unveiled a painting of her threatened glen and told the gathering of lawyers and witnesses that this was the landscape ScottishPower was hell-bent on destroying. She then stunned the inquiry by presenting the painting to Donald MacKay QC (now Lord MacKay of Drumadoon), senior counsel for ScottishPower, to ''remind him forever of the valley his clients wished to desecrate''.

In 1994 Chris Patten invited Yvonne to spend several months in Hong Kong as artist in residence during his period as governor. Having spent six years in Hong Kong as a teenager, Yvonne now found herself caught up in the dying days of the British colony and it was here her paintings took on a new, sinister character. Vibrant reds and blacks replaced the pale, monochromatic hues. Slaughtered animals, bloody pig carcasses, gutted fish, and pyramids of 100-year-old black eggs jostled for space in her canvases. Yvonne was painting for a major solo summer exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in London's Cork Street. The show, entitled Pigs and Fishes, was a critical success and resulted in a large number of sales and commissions.

On a routine visit to her doctor during January 1995, a lump was discovered in her abdomen. Five days later she underwent major surgery in London's top cancer hospital, Queen Charlotte's. Yvonne had embarked on her long battle against ovarian cancer. Painful chemotherapy and further operations followed. Yvonne rationalised that her Hong Kong paintings of bloody slabs, gory meat, and blackened eggs had been a premonition of her own impending illness, but she fought back courageously and was soon able to return to her studio at Kilrenzie.

The news that ScottishPower had won government approval to build the pylons convinced Yvonne to move house once more. This time, together with her new collie, Megan, she headed to the north-west Highlands and the remote village of Stoer, north of Lochinver. Once again, in a landscape dominated by towering black mountains and the crashing seas of the Minch, she transformed a lonely farm cottage into an artist's haven. During the last two years of her life, Yvonne combined her painting with the role of scriptwriter, preparing a semi-autobiographical film script depicting the life and loves of an artist in Scotland who dies tragically of cancer. It will be a fitting valediction to a short but glittering career, if Yvonne's script can make it on to the

silver screen.

Yvonne Hawker is survived by her parents and by her sisters, Lisette and Jacqueline.