

‘TWO PERSPECTIVES’
17th May to 15th June
‘TWO PERSPECTIVES’
17th May to 15th June
A landscape and still life painter, David Smith RSW’s work is shaped by his deep connection to nature and love of the outdoors. An avid hillwalker, mountaineer, and sailor, his global travels have enriched his artistic vision, yet it is the Scottish landscape - particularly the rugged west coast- that remains his enduring inspiration.
David is especially drawn to expansive skies, rocky shorelines, and the small fishing villages that line the coast, often featuring harbours, crofts, and boats in his compositions. He also paints more inland scenes, particularly those with trees, which he finds peaceful and meditative.
Camping and painting en plein air, David captures fleeting shifts in weather and light with a vibrancy that reflects his emotional connection to place. His paintings are rich in texture and energy, bringing the natural landscape vividly to life, often built up in bold layers of oil applied directly to the canvas.
In contrast to his landscapes, David’s still lifes are joyful and painterly, using vivid colours to evoke warmth and vitality.
Whether working outdoors or in the studio, his reflective process brings a calm, contemplative quality to his work, expressing the tranquillity he finds in nature.
For over four decades, Peter Davis RSW has harnessed the expressive potential of watercolour to convey the dynamic and untamed spirit of Scotland’s northern landscapes. Drawn to the medium for its fluidity and unpredictability, he sees watercolour as the most natural of all painting materials - its elemental simplicity of pigment, gum arabic, and water reflecting the very forces of nature he seeks to capture.
Peter does not aim to document the landscape in a literal sense. Instead, his work distills its essence - balancing abstraction and reality to evoke something deeper and more enduring. His paintings embody the extremes of nature: moments of stillness and turbulence, solidity and flow, all rendered with a delicate sensitivity to light, movement, and mood.
Watercolour, with its instinctive movement - pooling, settling, and drying in its own time - mirrors the organic processes of the natural world. For Peter, this intrinsic connection between medium and subject is central to his practice, allowing him to respond intuitively to the raw, elemental beauty of land and sea.
This latest collection is rooted in the landscape surrounding his home by the sea in Shetland. Each painting takes its title from Norn - a traditional, nowextinct Shetlandic language influenced by Norse cultures, including those of the Faroe Islands and Iceland. Once used by fishermen, Norn contained a unique vocabulary of words, shared only among them and believed to bring bad luck if spoken by others.