SHE is the lauded Scottish painter known for her ambiguous, ghostly and finely painted depictions of drapes and folded fabrics.
However, in a new exhibition of work to be unveiled at a show in Cumbria, Alison Watt has signalled a shift from her signature image to a new pre-occupation: tangled and hooped ropes, strings and coils, and stark images of folded plain paper, as well as books and feathers.
Ms Watt's work adorns the Scottish Parliament, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, and other venues, as well as major works in the Old Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Edinburgh, and the Uffizi in Florence.
This week, The Herald was granted an early look at her paintings for A Shadow on the Blind, the artist's new show at the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, which will open on October 12, which mark a startling change in subject matter.
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The Glasgow School of Art graduate said that she had been partially inspired by a work in the National Gallery of Scotland, a mysterious late 17th Century or early 18th Century still-life by the artist Thomas Warrender.
She said: "I'm fascinated by how, historically, painters look back on what has come before, in some ways that it is a pure form of admiration, hoping some of the greatness will rub off on you, that you will learn something.
"It's Warrender's only painting, so it is hard not to think about that - you wonder did he make others and they were destroyed? Did he put everything into this painting?
"Of all the objects he painted, there are several pieces of folded paper, and they were what drew me to that painting - there is something so satisfying about a piece of paper, the light and shade, but also symbolically, it is quite weighty.
"I kept going back to it, its an odd painting and curious, its strange in scale and the way its been painted, and when you look at it you feel off-kilter...I think there is something that is being drawn into a picture by something you think you know, but you don't."
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The hooped coils, Ms Watt said, were not painted from life but from her imagination, and include some physical impossibilities.
The paintings are currently in her studio in Edinburgh, before they are taken to the show in Cumbria, which includes some retrospective works.
The new paintings are also, like much of Watt's work, inspired the details of Old Master paintings, notably still-lives.
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She said: "The still life is often quiet, it is not grand, and is often associated with the domestic, and so the feminine.
"It has often a lowly position and it all these qualities about the still life that I find attractive, because its greatest power is its intimacy."
She added: "We all have a tendency to surround ourselves with objects in our everyday life, and we create stories around these objects, little narratives, and it causes us to look at these things differently.
"I love the idea of isolating these objects, taking them away from their original narratives, as we often do in our minds, and exploring a different narrative for them once they are separated."
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