Alison McWhirter
‘Colours of Love’
Foreword
We are thrilled to welcome Alison McWhirter back to the Annan Gallery for her third Solo Exhibition with us - and perhaps her most personal and expressive collection to date.
Following the huge success of our 2021 and 2023 exhibitions, Alison’s new collection, ‘Colours of Love’ showcases her bold and emotive style through paintings full of vitality, depth, and emotional resonance.
Over the past two years, Alison has continued to explore and refine her responses to the natural world. Her signature floral still-lifes are here, familiar in their intensity but newly enriched by a shift in format and perspective. Many pieces in the show reveal a move towards taller, vertical canvases, bringing a fresh sense of rhythm and intimacy to her work.
At the same time, there’s a clear deepening of her abstract language. At the heart of many of the new abstract works is a series of poems that Alison has returned to time and again. These paintings don’t illustrate the poems; rather, they respond to them in paint - open, lyrical, and emotionally charged.
For us at the gallery, it’s a genuine privilege to work with Alison again. Her paintings are vibrant, joyful, and often quietly profound.
We strongly encourage visitors to take the time to see this exhibition in person - the texture, depth, subtlety and emotional charge can only truly be felt when standing in front of the paintings. We’re immensely proud to be hosting ‘Colours of Love’ and can’t wait to share this exceptional collection with you.
Best wishes, Scott,
Susan and the Annan Gallery team
‘Colours of Love’
Exhibition opens Saturday 6th September at 10am
Sales enquiries welcome on receipt of this catalogue.
This electronic version of the catalogue features all paintings forming part of the exhibition. All paintings are supplied framed and the sizes quoted in the catalogue are canvas size only - please contact us for framed images and sizes.
The full exhibition of works will be able to view online at: www.annanart.com
Scan our QR Code to go directly to our Gallery website
Please note: We expect this to be a busy and popular exhibition so if you are interested in any pieces, we recommend contacting us early to reserve or buy.
Exhibition runs from Saturday 6th September to Sunday 28th September 2025
The Annan Gallery w 164 Woodlands Road, Glasgow, G3 6LL
email: gallery@annanart.com w phone: +44 (0)141 332 0028
Open Tuesday to Saturday 10am-5pm, Sunday 12-4pm, closed Mondays
Front Cover: ‘Close up of ‘There The Pink Mallow Grows And In Their Season Strawberries’
‘There
the Pink Mallow Grows And In Their Season Strawberries’ Oil, Canvas Size 120 x 100cm
‘Daffodils in Sunlight’ Oil, Canvas Size 50 x 40cm
‘Garden Sweet Peas’ Oil, Canvas Size 40 x 40cm
‘Asphodel,
That Greeny Flower’ Oil, Canvas Size 100 x 100cm
‘Sunflower, Superstar Rose And Peony Against Pale Umber’ Oil, Canvas Size 59 x 42cm
‘Irises in Sunlight’ Oil, Canvas Size 59 x 40cm
‘Colours of Love’
This ravishing exhibition - organised to the highest professional standards by Scott and Susan Bennett - is the latest in a series of solo shows in Glasgow’s prestigious Annan Gallery highlighting a selection of recent paintings by the most accomplished of the New Scottish Colourists, Alison McWhirter.
It comprises a single imposing landscape, a mesmerising group of large abstracts, and a homogeneous sequence of works devoted to the portrayal of specific garden flowers. These constitute the majority of the exhibits.
The inspiration behind the two principal categories - what the artist describes as “the running thread ” - is a remarkable collection of poems by William Carlos Williams called ‘Journey to Love’, which resonate with Alison on an intensely personal as well as a powerfully enriching artistic level.
All of the themes in Williams’s poems (which he dedicated to his wife) are concerned with Nature’s relationship to the course of love. Hence the title of this exhibition.
The lone landscape in the show, and the largest painting of them all, is Alison’s sublime ‘Sea View: Solway Coastline’. Typically, this was started outdoors, at a location close to Ruthwell Church affording a spectacular panorama of the Solway Firth. It was “retuned and completed ” in a single session in the artist’s top-floor studio in Dumfries, which provides an almost identical view.
Alison decided to include it to give some insight into where she lives and paints.
Inexorably over the last few years Alison’s work has manifested an irrepressible striving towards abstraction. This applies even to her more representational paintings but it is most apparent in the exponential growth in the output of her entirely abstract compositions, all of which reflect the pervasive influence of W. C. Williams’s poetry - to the extent that some of the paintings, such as ‘Asphodel,That Greeny Flower ’, take the names of individual poems, while the titles of others are quotations of lines in this poem.
These include ‘There the pink mallow grows and in their season strawberries’ and ‘I come, my sweet, to sing to you! ’. Arguably, the most sumptuous among them is ‘Journey to Love (after William Carlos Williams)’, which had the distinction of being selected by the Royal Scottish Academy to promote this year’s annual summer exhibition in Edinburgh.
Alison’s simple yet spellbinding floral still-lifes were characterised until very recently by their almost uniformly square formats. Here for the first time we are privy to her experiments with an exciting new series of vertical compositions, the most alluring of which were painted in her beloved garden.
Among these are ‘The Poet’s Wife’, a heartfelt depiction of one of her favourite roses; ‘Iris in Sunlight ’, dating from the summer of 2024; the scintillating ‘Sunflower, Superstar, and Peonies’; and ‘Garden Sweet -peas’, which records the first delicate blooms of a plant whose seeds were sown the previous year.
Alison is keen to emphasise how her intimate scrutiny of flowers is a vital prerequisite for the success of her abstract paintings. Indeed, they are so tightly interconnected that, as she acknowledges, “one cannot exist without the other ”.
However, whereas the achievement of capturing the essence of every single flower rewards her with endless pleasure, the production of her abstracts continually presents a daunting and seemingly insuperable challenge. On those uplifting occasions when she at last believes that “everything has come together ”, she understandably experiences total euphoria - a state akin to the exhilaration likely to be engendered in those fortunate to have visited this most memorable of exhibitions.
Dr Colin J. Bailey, 2025
‘Peace Roses’ Oil, Canvas Size 40 x 40cm
‘Sweet Peas in Morning Sunlight; June’ Oil, Canvas Size 59 x 42cm
‘Come My Sweet, I’ll Sing to You’ Oil, Canvas Size 100 x 100cm
‘Peony, Garden Rose and Sunflower Against Dusk Pink’ Oil, Canvas SIze 59 x 42cm
‘Lilies Against Yellow Lake’ Oil, Canvas Size 40 x 40cm
‘Narcissi in Sunlight’ Oil, Canvas Size 40 x 40cm
‘Sea View Solway Coastline’ Oil, Canvas Size 100 x 100cm
‘Peonies Against Baker Miller Pink’ Oil, Canvas Size 30 x 30cm
‘Journey to Love (After William Carlos Williams)’ Oil, Canvas Size 30 x 30cm
‘Garden Superstar Rose, Peony and Sunflower in Warm Pink’ Oil, Canvas Size 70 x 50cm
‘The Poet’s Wife’ Oil, Canvas Size 59 x 42cm
‘White and Cerise Peonies Against Warm Umber’ Oil, Canvas Size 40 x 40cm
Tyrian Orchid Against Warm Umber Oil, Canvas Size 40 x 40cm
‘Winter Sunset’ Oil, Canvas Size 50 x 70cm
‘Wintering Peonies’ Oil, Canvas Size 40 x 40cm
‘Sunset Song’ Oil, Canvas Size 60 x 80cm
‘Superstar Rose, Pink Rose and Peony Sunflower’ Oil, Canvas Size 40 x 40cm
‘African Violet’ Oil, Canvas Size 40 x 40cm
‘Pink and White Lilies Against Buff Titanium’ Oil, Canvas Size 50 x 50cm
‘Garden Irises’ Oil, Canvas Size 40 x 40cm
‘Peonies Against Palest Duck Egg Green Blue’ Oil, Canvas Size 60 x 60cm
‘Sundrenched Garden Roses’ Oil, Canvas Size 59 x 42cm
‘Garden Pink Roses Against Pampas Fawn Pink’ Oil, Canvas Size 59 x 42cm
‘Peonies Against Warm Pale Umber’ Oil, Canvas Size 60 x 60cm
‘Cerise Pink Peonies Against Slate Grey’ Oil, Canvas Size 40 x 40cm
‘Peonies Against Warm Umber’ Oil, Canvas Size 60 x 60cm
‘Sunflower, Superstar and Peonies’ Oil, Canvas Size 59 x 42cm
‘Cerise Pink Tulips Against Grey Umber’ Oil, Canvas Size 40 x 40cm
‘Mixed Roses Against Warm Buff Titanium’ Oil, Canvas Size 59 x 40cm
‘Opera Rose Against Warm Yellow White’ Oil, Canvas Size 50 x 40cm
‘Peace Roses Against Warm Lime White’ Oil, Canvas Size 59cmx42cm
‘The Pink Locust’ Oil, Canvas Size 100 x 100cm
‘Sweet Peas Against Light Crimson’ Oil, Canvas Size 40 x 40cm
Alison McWhirter b.1975
Born in Dumfries, Alison is a graduate of the prestigious Bath Spa Academy (formerly the Bath Academy of Art) and over the past two decades, since embarking on her painting career, Alison has consolidated her position as arguably the most gifted artist among the younger generation of New Scottish Colourists, producing works of irresistible allure.
Enjoying significant and well-deserved renown at home and abroad for her highly original still life paintings; her range of diverse landscape motifs and her bold, compelling abstracts. Paintings are exuberant in their colouring, technically innovative, and compositionally daring. In them there is a palpable tension between depiction and abstraction; between what is observed and what is imagined; what is seen and what is felt. Emphasising that her paintings are concerned with “pure feeling,” Alison wrote that she was “striving to get at the beauty in the things that surround us, to that which elevates us beyond reason.” Her deceptively modest compositions – in inverse proportion to the profundity of their message –express an array of personal emotions while simultaneously exploring universal human truths.
Alison’s paintings are underpinned by her unquestionable sincerity and characterised by such freshness and enthusiasm that they appear to have been painted spontaneously. In fact, although there are occasional acts of last-minute spontaneity, they are fundamentally the product of long periods of reflection and introspection. Alison is remarkable for her willingness to acknowledge the struggles entailed in making a painting; in her own words “to embrace the mysterious nature of the creative process.” Her style continues to evolve as a result of her constant, restless, unquenchable urge for experimentation, and an inexorable quest for ever greater abstraction. To this end, she has recently resorted increasingly frequently to the use of her own fingers and the palette knife, wielded at times with breath-taking bravura. The dominant colours are often transferred directly from the tube to the canvas, then smeared or swirled at will across the surface, culminating in a sensuous, thick, buttery impasto.
Acknowledgments
“I am deeply grateful to Scott and Susan for their generous support and for once again offering me the opportunity to present my third solo exhibition at Annan Gallery.Their continued belief in my work, and in its growth over time, means a great deal to me. I am also sincerely grateful to Dr Colin Bailey, whose thoughtful and perceptive introduction brings a profound resonance to this exhibition.‘’ Alison McWhirter, August 2025
