Alison Watt (Scottish painter)

Alison Watt OBE FRSE (born 1965) is a Scottish painter who first came to national attention while still at college when she won the 1987 Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Alison Watt was born in Greenock, Scotland. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1988. While still a student, she came to national attention by winning the 1987 John Player Portrait Award and as a result was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Queen Mother. Her first works to become well known were dryly painted figurative canvases, often female nudes, in light-filled interiors. An exhibition of her work entitled Fold in 1997 at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery was the first introducing fabric alongside these figures, simultaneously suggesting a debt to the 19th-century French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, as well as pointing to the possibilities of abstraction.

In 2000 she became the youngest artist to be offered a solo exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art with an exhibition called Shift, with 12 huge paintings featuring fabric alone.(source National Gallery, London) In 2003 Watt was shortlisted for The Jerwood Painting Prize.

Watt exhibited during the Edinburgh Festival 2004, installing a 12 ft painting Still, in the memorial chapel of Old St Paul's Church. Linen bound books were published to commemorate each exhibition. For Still, Alison Watt was awarded the 2005 ACE (Art+Christianity Enquiry) award for 'a Commissioned Artwork in Ecclesiastical Space'.

Her subsequent project 'Dark Light' was supported by her Creative Scotland Award of 2004 from the Scottish Arts Council.

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