Alison Watt

Alison Watt's monumental canvases reveal a deep fascination with the suggestive power of white fabric, often painted closely cropped as folds and gathers. She established her reputation as a skilful painter of nudes in light-filled interiors. However in the late 1990s, Watt's work unexpectedly took a new direction and the impression of the absent model's body on the sheet on which she had been lying became the inspiration for a remarkable corpus of work.As the National Gallery's seventh Associate Artist, Watt has been working in a studio in the Gallery in close proximity to paintings she has admired since first visiting the collection as a small child. The result is a series of powerful, large-scale paintings, derived from the tradition of drapery in western art. These paintings are built up using a selective palette of white, grey, burnt sienna, cadmium red and yellow.Alison Watt was born in Greenock in 1965 and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. In 2000, she became the youngest artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. In 2003, she was shortlisted for the Jerwood Painting Prize with works that were rendered with a sensual quality, evocative of the human presence and form.In this book, Colin Wiggins reviews Watt's career to date, and examines how the National Gallery collection and traditional representations of drapery in art are manifested in her paintings. The celebrated poet Don Paterson has written his response to these new works. The book is published to accompany the exhibition Alison Watt at the National Gallery, London, 13 March-22 June 2008.