Alison Watt valuation
Scottish painter of vast folds of white fabric, who began as a prize-winning portraitist.
Alison Watt was born in Greenock in 1965 and studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1983 to 1988.
What a work by Alison Watt is worth
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Bio
Alison Watt was born in Greenock in 1965 and studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1983 to 1988. While still a student she won the Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1987, which led to a commission to paint the Queen Mother. Her early reputation rested on figure paintings, often female nudes, in which fabric was a prop; from 1997, when the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh showed Fold, the cloth moved to the front, and her exhibition Shift at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2000 consisted of twelve large canvases of nothing but folded fabric. She was the youngest woman to have a solo exhibition there. She was Associate Artist at the National Gallery in London from 2006 to 2008, was appointed OBE in 2008, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2017.
Watt works slowly on large canvases, and her paintings come up less often than her drawings and smaller works. Provenance through her galleries and exhibition history are what buyers look for.
Glasgow, the Portrait Award and Phantom
Phantom, her exhibition at the National Gallery in 2008, grew from her fascination with one painting in the collection, Zurbarán's Saint Francis in Meditation.
Her work is in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Aberdeen Art Gallery and other Scottish public collections.
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